Comment Re:See. Patents/Copyright spur innovation. (Score 1) 491
b) that altruism is idiotic, (You _have_ heard of Philanthropy, right? I guess no one does anything for the betterment of mankind for free.)
Turns out the profit motive is a terrific way to get people to do useful things. Who'da thunk that people were willing to work so hard in order to get ahead. Amazing, isn't it?
Now I don't disagree with you that, yes, money provides a great incentive, but thankfully dinosaurs that think money is the _only_ way to motivate people are dying.
Charity and philanthropy are all well and good. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does wonderful things and has a huge budget. But in terms of scale, charitable activities are dwarfed by for-profit activity (my guess is by two or three orders of magnitude). Far from being dead, for-profit dinosaurs are alive, kicking ass and taking names. The open source/free software world is an anomaly and only works because software development can sometimes be done for very little cost other than your time. Don't fool yourself into thinking the rest of the world works anything like that.