they still need to get paid. How is their model innovative? It's a version of give away the razor so you continue to buy blades. Or sell a laser printer below cost, so people buy the cartridges and service. Software is unique in that it can't meet the warranty of merchant ability under the UCC, which they would have had to do if they sold their software outright. So they have to license. This is combination with making it very difficult to patent software caused the manufacturers to not give out the source code and make it hard to link to their software. It's as if you bought a Chevy truck and you couldn't change the tires or put in a new carburetor. This is one of the driving frustrations and motivations of the open source community. Because the property rights are weak in software, it has lead to every piece of software being an island. It has also lead to a culture of software engineers writing everything from scratch. It's inefficient from a free market sense and a technological advancement sense. It is a perfect example of one government policy causing a problem, and instead of removing the bad policy, we add on more rules and regulations to fix that. More bad on bad. Imagine if you could go out and buy a "component" to add to your existing products. The industry has been horribly retarded. It's like manufacturing of products before the American System of Manufacturing (standardized interchangeable parts)

see db's ironic comment above. They are using property rights to enforce their ownership.

if inventions are held in common, they tend to stagnate. This goes back to the argument that all property rights face. IF held in common what is the incentive for an individual to make improvements? Franklin's idea was very similar to the trade guilds of the Middle Ages. The result was very little inventing going on>therefore economically stagnant. In the case of Open Source community, very little disruptive has come out of that, despite all their claims to innovation. Ruby On Rails may be an exception to that...

Something can only be novel once.

Yes s/w is mainly protected by copyrights. However, patents can certainly apply. My guess is that when Adobe was founded the patent office had a strong policy against patents on software implemented invention, so that got ingrained in their culture. Either way their fundamental technology would no longer be subject to live patents.

The funny thing about GNU is that it relies on IP rights in order to enforce its anti IP license.

Yes there is overwhelming historical evidence. It is consistent with what we see for other property rights.

The correlation argument is not valid. Anyone who knows anything about property rights will see that their is a causation.

Use a lot of their products. These guys have gotten a lot of philanthropic coders to support many applications, and their software is among the best. They developed it, and claim their ownership rights, which they express in a contract that other improvements to their code must be put back into their collective, if those improvements are sold. They haven't demanded/taken at gunpoint (taxes) my money to compete with Microsoft and Adobe.
Honestly, if a group like this can reverse engineer a product as complex as Photoshop (e.g. GIMP), then the original product may no longer be as novel as people think. In this case SW is protected mainly by Copyrights, not patents, so reverse engineering is just fine.

Does anyone know of GNU getting government funding?

Agreed, but this is correlation not causality. Might it be the states with the strongest IP rights are more capitalistic, free, and/or more well educated. Is there logic showing which one came first?

Yes, they have. Now of course all they ask of you is that you not try to claim ownership over their ideas.

The Franklin model is getting its first true test, in an era of instantaneous communication that makes such a test fair.

I lean toward Edison. In that, I differ from modern libertarianism. However, I am not above taking ideas, particularly for my 3D printing R&D, from those who are foolish enough to post their ideas on the Internet. At that point, they have lost the ability to make money off of a patentable idea or improvement.

Since the government dollars came, I believe, from the Advanced Projects Research Agency, and thus grew out of government's obligation to protect people from foreign invasion, I think we can accept it as legitimate.

I'm more interested in the competition between the two ideals for invention: Benjamin Franklin, who held all inventions in common, and Thomas Edison, who used the patent system to finance his research.

My prior comment dealt with an objective evaluation of the software. Objectivistically speaking, I look at those government dollars as already having been spent; we might as well get as much mileage out of those dollars as possible. I agree that the competition with private industry is a problem, but it's not something I can really affect much at this point.

GNU was a nice piece of software for what my grad student needed to get done. I agree with your statement about "declaring such a common". The people who developed GNU did it off of government dollars, and I think I remember my grad student telling me four years ago when he was using it that the GNU software was better for parallelizing the computations over a network of PC's than your typical computational chemistry software that runs off of only one PC. The only real alternate is the modern day equivalent of the old Cray supercomputers.

What do you think of it? Objectively (and Objectivistically) speaking, I don't see how we can stop anyone from declaring such a common. Nor have they announced plans to outlaw proprietary software; they simply insist their model will win in the marketplace. Would you find that realistic?

I am familiar with GNU. One of my students needed it to do a computational chemistry project.

Modern libertarianism has developed a disturbing streak, one calling for no ownership. By anyone. Common ideas, common inventions, even common land.

What is the GNU General Public License, but an intellectual common? Is anyone here familiar with that?

Actually, Benjamin Franklin had a similar idea. Were he alive today, he would set up a Free Hardware Foundation, to complement the Free Software Foundation. This on the theory that "information wants to be free."

I like this quote from the article "It is bewildering, for example, to find a libertarian think tank arguing that government projects are superior to private property rights as a means of directing resources to innovative activities."

What is amazing is that the evidence between inventions, economic growth, and property rights for inventions is overwhelming. Those countries with the strongest patent systems are leaders in creating new technologies and the leaders in disseminating new technologies.