[edoo]

There are basically 2 ways to make money. You can provide value where people are willing to voluntarily trade their own labor for that perceived value, and taking it by force. Bill Gates is an example of both. His contribution and a lot of the money he earned was because the value of his product was worth far more to people than the asking price. He received a fraction of the value he created in the world. He also got the government to give him a monopoly on the ideas that were implemented, preventing others from implementing those ideas with violence. I'm in the camp that says the latter is inexcusable in a society. I suspect gates and most billionaires would not be billionaires if it weren't for the monopoly protections enforced by government. Where would the rest of that wealth have gone? To anyone who was able to compete against the ideas.

[iudqnolq]

That's definitely possible. But it's also possible no one would have spent the time to come up with the idea if they knew someone else could build on their work and release the same thing for cheaper.

I don't know which is true, although I have suspicions, and unless you've revolutionized the discipline of economics (and decided to inform the world in Internet comments) your certainty is unwarranted. You could have at least acknowledged that counterarguments to your thesis exist.

[edoo]

I think Linux is a counter example to that. A lot of commercial companies have contributed to the evolution and made a lot of money competing with each other delivering support for public projects. Linux has added a ton of value to the world yet there are no companies or people approaching the value of MS. The wealth was distributed via competition and a lot more of it stayed with the customers than othwerwise would have.

[iudqnolq]

Open source is a good example of people not acting for immediate monetary gain, you're right, although legally the licenses rely on copyright law.

I absolutely didn't mean to say the comment I replied to was necessarily wrong, I wanted to point out the commentator made a confident claim that completely failed to address any of it's well-known counterarguments. I meant to criticize the commentator for failing to acknowledge that reasonable people have argued against their case; if I had used that to make a case that their argument was wrong I'd have succumbed to the ad-hominem fallacy.