Economic efficiency
Economic efficiency
Posted Oct 1, 2010 13:27 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784)In reply to: Red Hat failed to achieve the Supreme Court decision it wanted by sustrik
Parent article: Red Hat Responds to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Request for Guidance on Bilski
Think about it. Today every company has a person that codes around MS bugs. In the future you would need just one person to fix the bug.
This fits into the whole "90% less taxes" remark quite well. But what the proprietary model encourages is economic inefficiency: you have to hire more people to do stuff, that means generating more revenue to cover those personnel costs, that means customers paying more, themselves charging more to cover your prices, and so on.
Although some people think this is just great ("Look at all this money sloshing around - what a vibrant economy!") it provides limited benefit. You can now just about manage to code around Microsoft's bugs whereas you could be providing more value in other functionality instead. And even if you decided to lay off the person writing the workarounds, it doesn't mean that they'll go straight to the welfare queue: they could quite easily be competing with you in another company instead.
What I find distasteful is the way that people supposedly holding "the market" in high regard advocate various business models by saying that they create jobs and encourage "capitalism" and "functioning markets", but if other business models which actually make the economy more efficient are promoted (or heaven forbid, the government decides to create jobs itself), creating wealth in other ways, these alternatives are condemned by the same people as somehow being "socialist" and "wrong".
I guess it's just not acceptable to refer to things like economics unless someone is given the opportunity to siphon off large amounts of money at some point or other. Robin Hood would have been a "communist" had he not had that secret offshore bank account. That kind of thing.