Teever

Sounds like a European variation of the "China can't invent anything, they only copy" to me.

The US government, through intellectual property law and regulations that enabled a monopoly for Bell created the environment that allowed Bell to create and commercialize the transistor. They also created the regulations and the market for aircraft and computers as the largest consumer of them during the second world war.

The combination of these government interventions amongst others is what enabled the rapid development of these fields which lead to the computer revolution that we all enjoy This is an amazing thing to be sure, but it isn't an example of free-market forces at work.

It's an example of a government reading the global conditions in which it found itself in and successfully responding to those conditions by regulating and investing in key industries to ensure the dominance of the nation that the government manages. No doubt there were problems with these government interventions but they are on the whole an amazing success story for America and the world as a whole.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen didn't dream up their ideas for computing in a vacuum, they were fortunate to come of age in a time and place that gave them access to state of the art computers in their youth and later as young adults when Gates attended Harvard where they developed their BASIC on a PDP-10 that was funded by DARPA.

> Yes, I've heard the story that X was the result of A+B+C+D+E+F+G and B was done by the government, and so the government gets all the credit.

I'm not saying that the government gets all the credit here. I'm simply saying that the success story of the American tech industry is one that is the result of seeds planted by the government decades ago and one that we all enjoy the fruits of. Government regulations, investments, and purchasing contracts play a large role in why you and I can use and enjoy free software in our every day lives.

Should a large scale conflict between the United States and another power break out, and one that is particularly bloody and challenging for American forces to win it will be interesting to see how the American military and media/tech companies deal with the flow of graphic footage from the battlefront.

I've heard it said that the broadcasting of graphic battle footage on the nightly news during the Vietnam war played a large role in the public losing support for that conflict and that the US government learned from this and provided a much more sanitary and managed view of the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and again Iraq during the 1990s and 2000s.

From what I've seen on subreddits like /r/combatfootage/ or /r/credibledefense/ that doesn't seem to be possible anymore. There's a tremendous amount of video from the conflicts in Syria, Sudan, and Ukraine and the administrators and moderators of these places seem to allow the distribution and discussion of these videos.

Right now it's pretty common to see Ukrainian and their supporters refer to Russians as "orcs" (I'm assuming Russians say similar things about the Ukrainians on social media too) with little to no push back from admins or moderators despite this being blatantly dehumanizing language which is often against the rules in these online forums.

I predict that moderators will expose further biases and double standards towards Americans should graphic videos of American soldiers dying becomes a standard feature of our social media landscape and will punish people for this kind of disparaging commentary about invading American soldiers.

I'm not seeing the connection between a relative lack of regulation in the software industry and the price of FOSS software being (close to) zero or your larger assertion regarding free markets and prosperity in general.

At the same time I'm not sure that the computer industry is a good example for your claim due to its roots in the Bell telecommunication monopoly and the massive subsidies from the US military that lead to the wide availability of the cheap personal computers that most of the open source software that you are talking about originated from.

If anything the rise of American tech giants and the proliferation of cheap computers is directly attributable to decades of intervention by the US government and not a free market success story.