🚀 go-pugleaf

> That is correct, but nobody is proposing that tax-supported freeware
> should be the only way to produce software either.

I still think the market for free software would be better off without
the economic distortions of any government funding (other than, say,
for specific milatary/otherwise governmentally legitimate
purposes). No one says that taking a government subsidy should be the
only way to grow wheat in the US, but it still has a huge effect on
the US wheat market as a whole, and not a good one.

> I'm not so sure of that. All European universities are and have always
> been funded by the state.

As far as I know, many of the earliest universities in Germany, for
example, were founded by groups of students and were not initially
funded by the state.

I believe other intitutions that became universities were founded by
the Church.

> Were it not for public funding of mathematicians, we would have had to
> extend patents to theorems or else we wouldn't have gotten any new ones.

What public funding supported Euclid? Pythagoras? It's clearly not the
case that either state funding or math patents are necessary for new
theorems to be created.

> What? Newton, Euler, Gauss, Poincare, Riemann: all funded by the state
> or some king, ultimately receiving tax payer's  money.

I'll yield these specific point, because I don't know enough of the
details of their funding to argue meaningfully.

However, many important theorems were discovered by hobbyists, the
independently wealthy, those with private patrons, individuals
supported by charity, etc.

 - Maciej Stachowiak

-- 
guile -c '(define c call-with-current-continuation)(define(f s)(lambda(o)(let
((n(c(lambda(x)(o x)x))))(let p((n n)(l(string->list s)))(cond((not (null? l)
)(display(car l))(p(c n)(cdr l))))))))((f"Js nte ul akr")(f"utAohrGieHce\n"))'