[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.