🚀 go-pugleaf

Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:
> Axel Boldt <axel@uni-paderborn.de> wrote:
> >Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:
> >
> > > The original proposal I was responding to, was to have a hardware tax
> > > that would be the sole form of funding Open Source software. While
> > > money is not the sole factor for project viability, government funding
> > > of some projects would produce massive distortions in where the
> > > development effort goes.
> >
> > Note however that this is exactly how science works. Government
> > decides what to fund, with tax money. Both capitalist and socialist
> > societies have used this model; it seems to be a clear winner in the
> > marketplace of ideas.
> 
> This is not the only way science works,

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

> nor has this model been widely in use historically.

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

> > Were it not for this, you would see
> > mathematicians patent applications of their theorems. The way it is,
> > theorems are released into the public domain and everybody wins.
> 
> Gimme a break, mathematical theorems were never patentable.

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.

> And the vast majority of the great mathematicians of history did not
> have government funding.

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

-- 
 Axel Boldt  **  axel@uni-paderborn.de  **  math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/