Comment by skrtskrt
4 days ago
Intellectual property is terrible for society on the whole.
You could just as easily argue "why are 200 companies burning through people and natural resources to come up with the exact same thing and then marketing it as different" as you can say "why would anyone create anything without the ability to making oodles of money by restricting imitation".
Just stop this nonsense. Intellectual property is good. Free open source is not good. Anything that is free while take a lot of effort is essentially killing potential jobs. Wake up.
In a society rich enough to be able to provide for everyone (which it is) and where food and housing are abundant (which they should be), then things being free isn't bad because you aren't worried about making money to live.
You are the one who needs to wake up from the assumption that the only way to live is to hoard your intellectual products instead of imagining a society where you can stop having to compete on that level.
Not only that, rent seeking destroys jobs as a result of artificial scarcity and hoarding.
You pay $1000 to a monopolist instead of $100 to a small business and then having the other $900 to spend on whatever you want, like patronizing 9 other small businesses and actually getting something more for your money. The $900 in monopoly rent goes to Wall St instead of Main St and is used to e.g. bid up housing costs so people can't afford to buy a house.
The incumbents lobby for restrictive zoning or professional licensing gatekeeping to keep those rents high, which means fewer jobs doing construction.
It doesn't help you for huge corporations to get more of your money.
6 replies →
You are living in a dream world. Look around what is happening on planet Earth.
Are you from 1995? FLOSS won long ago. Services give companies far more money than software. Closed software it's dead. Custom services and in-place programming (adding features, interop...) for small non-IT companies gives far more money for IT companies.
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