[kriops]

That is just an outright lie. Even most of the open source stuff I'm going to assume you are thinking of could never have existed without adjecent profit-driven ecosystems.

Profit drives innovation, and more importantly makes technology accessible at scale. Do you think most of the world would have access to washing machines (which are of ridiculous utility, especially when you factor in their price with profit margins and all!) if it were not for some schmuck wanting to line his or hers of pocket? Because it would not.

At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).

Tl;dr: Economics 101.

[nottorp]

> Profit drives innovation

Yeah, like US cable and telco companies like to remind you every time they do an anticompetitive move.

[itsoktocry]

>like US cable and telco companies like to remind you every time they do an anticompetitive move.

And despite that, who is helping move the telco world forward? Pointing to one mediocre example is certainly not proof that profit doesn't drive innovation.

[broken-kebab]

...which is a problem caused by regulatory red tape, guarding a few companies from competition isn't it?

[bmicraft]

No red tape needed, when comcast temporarely lowers their rates anywhere a new provider is trying to gain ground. Even the threat of doing that is enough to stop most attempts dead in their tracks.

[broken-kebab]

It's not impossible to enter a market offering better services for bigger price than you competitors really. Or having better tech it's possible to attract enough investments to overstay lowered prices. Or use other ways which definitely work outside of US telco industry.

[seanw444]

And this predicament has been caused by their decades of being given special treatment via government interference.

[arghwhat]

Competition drives innovation in pursuit of greater profit. Profit itself drives nothing, which is why anticompetitive markets always stagnate.

[ants_everywhere]

This is like the nursery rhyme version of economics we tell to freshmen. The truth is pretty far from this.

My personal take is that in practice most of the innovation we see in tech comes from the universities. E.g. the tech in search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI etc.

The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector. There the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate.

Commercialization does often require some innovation around the edges, which companies often get by hiring talent from academia.

I realize this is unlikely to be a super popular opinion for some HN readers. But to me it's the one most defensible by evidence.

[phpisthebest]

>>The tech is then, in practice, given to the private sector.

100% false, normally the people that created the tech while in university are the ones that create the business using the test (see facebook, google, etc), it is their tech to begin with it was not given to them

In most cases the University is also either paid a fee, or is part owner in the company as a startup, cashing out when funding starts.

Nothing is "given away"

now I personally think anything developed using Government Grants should be Public domain, non-patentable, non-copyright, 100% public domain, but ....

[ants_everywhere]

The technologies I mentioned were all developed by dozens or hundreds of people over the course of decades. Statistically, P(you become a founder | you helped invent the tech) is basically 0. Although you are probably right that P(you helped invent the tech | you are a founder) may be nonzero.

[kriops]

"(...) nursery rhyme (...)" is a nice way of not addressing what was said. Good for you.

Yes, a lot of discoveries (not "most innovation", but besides the point!) happens at Universities. But so what? Universities are either for-profit themselves, or they are financed through taxes which depends on the profitability of businesses in the economy which they exist in and contribute to. And like a sibling comment pointed out: Researchers are often the ones commercializing a discovery. Moreover, I specifically stated that "[the commercializing actor] makes technology accessible at scale."

Your statement that "the profit motive is used to commercialize rather than innovate" is a half-truth, because the profit motive is very much present once you consider more than the first-order effects.

I 100% agree that commercialization of new techology (again, innovation is a lot more than bleeding-edge research) e.g., search engines, smart phones, the internet, LLMs and AI, is optimally done through some kind of interaction between univiersities and commercial actors – but to the mutual benefit of a spiderweb of stakeholders affiliated with both academia and commercial actors, and not some quasi-altruistic act of sacrifice on the part of the university.

[littlecosmic]

People aren’t just motivated by profit, but those urges are marginalised by the current system.

[broken-kebab]

You should realize that the second part of your claim is just a postmodernist mantra (written to sound fine, links to reality skipped). In observable world one needs better economy to contribute more time to not-for-profit activities. While each, and every attempt to destroy evolutional capitalism to replace it with revolutional whatever "non-gready" model consistently lead to notable worsening of economy.

[hkt]

Worsening of economy by what measure? The argument is circular if you're saying "less profit is made in economic setups which encourage not-for-profit activity". It hardly seems like a reasonable criticism.

More interesting is what people would achieve if their time wasn't dedicated to profit seeking. The measure of success then may be the subjective usefulness of someone's contributions. It is a big subject but waving it away as you have isn't a satisfactory answer at all

[Joker_vD]

You don't understand. You can't just e.g. sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take siesta with your spouse, and spend evenings playing guitar and sipping wine with your friends; you have to spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat, then with the proceeds from the bigger boat buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats, then you open your own cannery, controlling the product, processing and distribution. You would expand, branch out, acquire and merge, do an IPO and then, in twenty or so years if everything goes well, you could retire with millions in your bank account and then, I don't know, move to live somewhere on a nice coast, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take siesta with your spouse, and spend evenings playing guitar and sipping wine with your friends.

[meiraleal]

Linux and git, probably the two most successful free software programs out there were both created by one person (the same person) WITHOUT relying on a "profit-driven ecosystem". His code made trillions of dollars but that wasn't what motivated him nor he got some % as those new kids (and their VC parents) joining FOSS wants to.

[thfuran]

He could not have made Linux into what it is today without additional contributors, and many of those contributors have been in the employ of companies that use Linux.

[meiraleal]

Yeah so he helped create a system where contribution beats direct monetary benefit. Microsoft tried hard with hundreds of billions to prevent Linux success, the fact that it spends so much money on it nowadays proves that no amount of money could have stopped Linux success.

[thfuran]

You think the companies that are paying employees to contribute are doing so out of sheer benevolence and not because they derive monetary benefit?

[meiraleal]

No benevolence at all, pretty much the opposite. That's my point since the beginning.

[kriops]

Linux and git were examples I was thinking of. He could still have made them, but most of their value relies on interactions with commercial offerings. Not to mention technology financed on the back of taxed profits. And their availability to regular people (notice how I talked about "making technology available at scale") would be diminished beyond belief.

But yes, people make the most incerdible stuff without being paid to do so.

[specialist]

I'm not motivated by cash. I'm very innovative (IMHO). I just like solving people's problems.

Alas, me having the business acumen of plankton means I'm easy calories for the vulture capitalists. Sigh.

[Joker_vD]

> At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations).

I am pretty certain we had economics for millenia before capitalism has emerged about three hundred years ago.

[aserafini]

Do you mean greedy, as in the sense of a greedy algorithm? Because I don’t have a formal mathematical description for this, but it feels more ‘optimal’ than a purely greedy algorithm.

Local agent behaviour may be greedy, but this could still result in something approaching a global optimum - the economy could work like Ant Colony Optimisation in aggregate.

Isn’t this Adam Smith‘s theory?

[KingMob]

You're asking the wrong person. "Greedy" is quoted from the grandparent comment, not the parent you're responding to.