The free market should solve this problem
Of course it could. The only problem is that we don't have free markets today. The markets (and information flow) are dominated by a small group of organizations with political influence.
Only a policy of Nationalizing Patents...
I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if a million Ayn Rand fans cried "Atlas Shrugged!" and were suddenly silenced.
I've seen this happen repeatedly. Trying to implement a Grand Plan usually results in nothing.
Almost every large project I've dealt with and was delivered without any major catastrophes was rolled out piecemeal. We picked the core/representative functionality, nailed the scope down with a sledgehammer and built it as "phase 1". All scope creep got pushed to "phase 2". Once phase 1 was done we just pick stuff out of the phase 2 bucket that can be done in the allotted time and just repeated the process. Obviously, we had to tinker with the phase 1 design to get the new stuff to inter-operate at times, but that was better than the alternative. Not saying that this works for all types of projects (or that it's in anyway a fancy idea -- I thought incremental development was SW 101), but I've personally never seen a Grand Plan / Big Bang implementation work. Hardest part? Convincing management that the alternatives are: target for full scope and get nothing, or, target for limited scope.
Hackers of the world, unite!