"depending primarily on the sunk costs necessary to innovate in a field."
Unfortunately, there is a strong correlation between patents and cost of innovating in a field. Once you start handing out monopolies, the overhead costs simply grow without competetive pressure to hold them down.
"Since the cost of software innovation is low, the potential payback is fast, and so the period of protection should be low as well."
It's low now. But once you have those two years protection in the field, you need to start hiring lawyers to be certain you're legitimate. And then you'll have to start paying royalty fees for all protected components you use. And then you need an office to house your lawyers, you need a sales negotiation team to sell your product, which you'll _have_ to do to recuperate your now far higher fees, etc, etc, etc.
And then the cost gets high enough to warrant extension...
Suddenly, it's no longer doable by a small team in a basement.
Unfortunately it appears to be a solid law of economics, removing competetive pressure does not create a more competetive industry, it creates a less competetive industry whose costs will ballon as capital becomes available.
And even more unfortunately, it holds true not only for the software business, but for things like pharmaceuticals as well. They dont need patents because development is horrendously expensive; development (not to mention marketing and administration) has become horrendously expensive because they get patents.
"One of the most revered and holy things the American people have is a free and open market system."
With the amount of attacks against the free market in the form of intellectual monopoly 'property', that freedom of the market doesnt appear to be very revered or holy.
In fact, a whole lot of the bigger players appear to be perfectly happy with state protected monopolies, as long as they get to own the monopolies.
"I'd like to see them show more concern for the ebbing of Democracy in our own damn country"
Sometimes it gets hard to see who's taking after whom. Unfortunately, instead of getting the best of all systems, it appears some are tempted to cherrypick the worst parts and putting them together.
Of course, the actual lesson to be learned from this case would be that lawyers should be legally barred from participation in any way in what the legislative branch does, as they're not interested in jurisprudece per se, only in how to corrupt the legal code in such a way as to make as much money as possible from it. And, as we as a society pay the final economic bills of a defective legal code, it's far past time to kick them out.
"Having sole rights to a particular work doesn't really make a monopoly except in a rediculously narrow view."
The breadth of a monopoly is dependent on the product specification, not on any specific inherent breadth attribute.
For example, a monopoly on aluminium is not a monopoly on construction materials. It is nevertheless a monopoly, and the economic effect remains in effect. The aluminium does not get produced and sold at the most competetive and economically efficient price. Any and all products whose specifications require actual aluminium will inherit the inefficiencies, and the total wealth of the economy will be lower than what it would have been if the aluminium had been competetively produced. There's less economic damage than if someone had had a monopoly on all construction materials, but the damage remains.
The money spent paying for the monopoly derived higher costs would otherwise have been spent in other parts of the economy.
"Free market does not prevent other publishers and authors from making similar books that teach the same thing with equivalent words and pictures."
Unless they for all intents and purposes can replace the original for the consumer, and are not themselves subject to the same monopoly inefficiencies, that doesnt remove the economic damage.
Lets play a mind game. Take that $200 book and calculate the cheapest way it could possibly have been produced. Allow factors that some consumers would have been satisfied with downloading the text, others would have wanted it in paper, but would have been satisfied with lower quality paper and black/white printing only. Say, maybe on average the cost would fall to maybe $5-$20 per copy. Now take those $180 and multiply it by the number of copies sold and insert that into the economy as money available to purchase other items instead.
Now, from that little mind game, extrapolate to the entire intellectual monopoly business and calculate the total loss to the economy.
"but you seem to advocate stripping them of that priviledge."
Not really. I advocate subjecting the intellectual monopoly segments to the same free market rules that everyone else has to live with, because the damage caused by monopolistic exceptions is too large and will only grow in the future.
That's not necessarily incompatible with authors having a certain amount of control, or getting paid for their work. For a wild example of how one compatible system could work; instead of monopoly control, authors (and anyone else involved in the production) could get attritbution credits, which would then pay out on a per-person-copy basis over a certain amount of time. You could write a book, anyone copying or printing it would simply note that a copy for them was made, and you could claim a check for the number of copies made. Financing of the system could be through a printing tax or system of your choice; if the price of a book falls from $200 to $20, I suspect we could afford a small cost there.
Anyone who has an IPv4 address has an entire block of IPv6 addesses. With 6to4 you dont need any support from your ISP (well, as long as they're not actively blocking such traffic).
"For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by prepending 2002 (hex) to the IPv4 address. Thus for the global IPv4 address 207.142.131.202, the corresponding 6to4 prefix would be 2002:CF8E:83CA::/48. (IPv4 addresses use decimal notation while IPv6 addresses use hexadecimal notation). This gives a total prefix length of 48 bits, the same as an end site is supposed to be allocated under normal IPv6 address alocation leaving room for a 16 bit subnet field and a 64 bit address within the subnet." - Quote from Wikipedia 6to4 entry
You're not paying $200 because it costs $200 for the most cost effective producer to produce the book. You're paying $200 because that's what the only legal producer of the book knows that enough students will pay when their only alternative is to go without the book.
That's the essential difference between a free market and a monopoly. In a free market, competition will set the price near the cost of producing the book. In a monopoly market, the monopoly owner sets the price at the point where many consumers can just barely afford the product, because that's what maximizes total revenue. In one situation, the cost of production has something to do with the price, in the other it has nothing to do with the price.
So, for all you know, and for all you can do, the publishers may be snorting coke for your money. It's not like you can legally obtain a version of that specific book from someone who's actually checked the facts, or who's selling it for $5 when all they're doing is paying for a print run.
Otherwise the biometrics and RFID scammers couldnt sell billions of dollars worth of useless equipment to governments who want to appear to be doing something.
It's simply a good way to separate the taxpayers from their money.
"Which is why natural monopolies like that should be state-owned."
Not entirely true. The infrastructure itself serves society best as a collectively owned commons; the wires, the pipes, the roads, the rails, the cables and data/voice carriers. Redunancy beyond such designed for availablity is pointless waste, you dont need two electricity grids, two streets to every house or two cell phone networks. You need a single one that works well.
However, the services provided over them, and the maintenance of them and construction of them, are better off being subjected to competition. Having many companies selling electricity on the common grid, many providers selling cellular phone and data services over a common network, and many companies and individuals providing transport on the roads creates lower prices and adaption to demand, optimizing the utilization of resources available.
Of course, if those conservatives had actually considered the economic implications of intellectual monopolies, and realized that their actual nature was similar to product taxation, they might come to the conclusion that state supported monopolies are actually not at all "business friendly".
In fact, the concept of the state supported 'intellectual property' has more in common with the idea of state owned means of production than it has with a capitalist free market.
These days one could design hardware that will only load signed code. Think RIAALinux running on an RIAA certified RIAABios compatible PC. Change the code so the protection is stripped out, and the hardware simply will refuse to run the code at all, as it would no longer be correctly signed. You'd have GPL code which would be effectively unmodifiable...
All patents are instantly damaging. As legal monopoly rights the existence of patents slow down adoption of innovation and, as such, slows down innovation in society as a whole. It creates an incentive for protecting, enhancing, and investing in the value of the monopoly as such, through marketing, litigation, lock-in, tie-in and other rent-seeking behaviour, not for the investment in R&D. As such, they are the antithesis of a free market, constantly raising the cost of production rather than lowering it.
True. Therefore, to reach a satisfying compromise, lets take the position that all 'intellectual property' whatsoever must be immediately and retroactively declared invalid without any transition period, and any and all ill-gotten license fees and price gouging of any sort attributable to such illegitimate monopoly legislation shall be immediately refunded.
Some form of middle ground from that point of view and their point of view might even be somewhat remotely acceptable...
'the case for software patents is strongly reminiscent of the case for "Intelligent Design"'
The case for patents in general, you mean. The effects are just very much more obvious when you have an segment that has previously been spared from them.
"It would get noisy eventually though, and the fans would need to be replaced every once in a while."
Yep, hence the (longterm):). In my experience you'd have to eventually replace both some of the drives and the fans, and the wear on the mechanical components would be worse the more thermal dissipation you need as you'd probably get varied thermal expansion in different places. It would be fine for a server, especially if it was in a relatively dust-free environment, but not the kind of thing you'd want in your livingroom.
It's a grossly flawed design based on old PVR concepts. A more modern system wouldnt put that many tuners in a single case; you'd distribute them over your LAN. You wouldnt have disks in a frontend system; it's more or less impossible to keep that many disks cool and (longterm) silent in a single case. You wouldnt need a fast CPU, again, post-recording compression would be distributed over the LAN.
But I suspect those decisions may have something to do with having to use SnapStream...
"I see the next incarnation of war to be a big battlebot war or something."
The biggest advantage of automated warfare is that the battlebots dont complain about the constitution, they dont have friends or relatives among the population and they wont refuse to fire on their own citizens.
Why do you think some politicians are drooling all over this kind of technology?
"I am _for_ government granting artificial protections to people/organizations that create IP"
Why?
It would be entirely possible to have a non-monopoly protective system, where, for example, you apply for a 'innovation credit patent', much like today, but instead of threatening and/or coercing every user of the invention for your money, the users would simply notify the PTO that their product contains your innovation, and the PTO would pay you.
See, for example, in your hypothetical situation where you feel your work is 'cloned'. If an OSS project imitated your product, they'd simply notify (or you could) the PTO and you'd get paid. The conflict would be removed from the system.
Even better, you could strike out on your own, and invent away, and you wouldnt even have to worry about financial muscles for litigation, marketing, distribution, etc. If you were inventive enough so that other people picked up and used what things you got innovation credits for you'd get paid.
There is the financing problem, but as the current system is financed through monopoly rent exaction, it is more or less equal to a very high product tax on new things. A more controlled financing system based on similar taxation but spread over both new and old products would add the benefit of encouraging the adoption of newer and more efficient products in the economy. It would also be far more finegrained than the current so-so many years, which somehow equates to a certain amount of money depending on economic factors, enforcement policy, etc, and has a very unpredictable and difficult to measure effect on consumers, invention, taxpayers and the economy.
A system for stimulating innovation where you could actually say 'we want to encourage more research, lets increase funding!', rather than 'uh, we'd also like to be innovative, so lets protect companies from competition...err...which accomplishes the goal by... um, well, the protected ones say it makes them more competetive... um?'.
Imagine that.
"Yes, we are _required_ to persue possible patent infringers for our patents to remain valid."
Eh, no, that's trademarks. Patents are valid or invalid regardless of enforcement (actually, they run a higher risk of being found invalid if you enforce them, since chances are higher that someone challanges them).
Of course, the EPO handing out software patents doesnt necessarily mean they're valid as long as their legal foundation is dubious. As long as that is the case, corporations and patent trolls have to be careful about what they try to enforce, or they may end up with legally worthless paper rather than probably worthless paper.
Monopolies in software markets are ultimately derived from the monopoly power inherent in intellectual property legislation. The correct free market solution is, indeed, not more regulation, but removing the fundamental legislation causing the problem.
However, it might not be enough for, say, an automated unmanned airborne cargo carrier. Or a vehicle autonavigation system.
The point is that there are potential civilian applications which need both improved resolution and a high level of guaranteed availability and accuracy. Some regions may want to move forward with such technology.
The unusual thing is that those costs are also financed by the monopoly rent income of the patents. A specific public incentive system intended to stimulate R&D. Again; in the pharmaceutical industry, we'd get five times the R&D if we simply revoked all patents and funded the R&D part outright ourselves, and let generics producers battle it out on the free market.
The marketing, administration and other costs may, or may not, be reasonable and comparable to non-IP industry, but they sure arent necessary for the public interest purpose of the patent system.
Dont worry, they'll price themselves out of business. Like you say, we're already reachable more or less everywhere else, so the value of the service is negligable, nevermind worth what a monopoly will charge.
"It argues that the individuals that made open source a success were only figureheads and not all that important."
Actually, I read it more like it argues that the economics of collaboration around non-scarce resources, multiplied by the economics of internet communication, made the opensource/free software growth more or less inevitable. If those individuals hadnt stepped up, others would have. The fact that even in the early 90's there were several free/oss operating system projects moving along suggests that it may be a valid theory.
The wheel simply makes economic sense. It solves a particular problem efficiently, and if you have a million engineers with an itch to scratch, chances are at least a few of them will come up with an itch-scratcher.
That doesnt mean those individuals havent deserved the credit, it simply means that the success of their work is not the result of random genetics and personality, but due to significant actual changes in the economics of communication, distribution and collaboration.
Some of the cost compared with general chemical industry undoubtedly derives from that, yes, but compare with generics manufacturing. As far as I can tell, the protected segments of the industry appear to spend an inordinate amount of resources on cost of sales compared to the heavily competetive unprotected segments.
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"depending primarily on the sunk costs necessary to innovate in a field."
Unfortunately, there is a strong correlation between patents and cost of innovating in a field. Once you start handing out monopolies, the overhead costs simply grow without competetive pressure to hold them down.
"Since the cost of software innovation is low, the potential payback is fast, and so the period of protection should be low as well."
It's low now. But once you have those two years protection in the field, you need to start hiring lawyers to be certain you're legitimate. And then you'll have to start paying royalty fees for all protected components you use. And then you need an office to house your lawyers, you need a sales negotiation team to sell your product, which you'll _have_ to do to recuperate your now far higher fees, etc, etc, etc.
And then the cost gets high enough to warrant extension...
Suddenly, it's no longer doable by a small team in a basement.
Unfortunately it appears to be a solid law of economics, removing competetive pressure does not create a more competetive industry, it creates a less competetive industry whose costs will ballon as capital becomes available.
And even more unfortunately, it holds true not only for the software business, but for things like pharmaceuticals as well. They dont need patents because development is horrendously expensive; development (not to mention marketing and administration) has become horrendously expensive because they get patents.
"One of the most revered and holy things the American people have is a free and open market system."
With the amount of attacks against the free market in the form of intellectual monopoly 'property', that freedom of the market doesnt appear to be very revered or holy.
In fact, a whole lot of the bigger players appear to be perfectly happy with state protected monopolies, as long as they get to own the monopolies.
"I'd like to see them show more concern for the ebbing of Democracy in our own damn country"
Sometimes it gets hard to see who's taking after whom. Unfortunately, instead of getting the best of all systems, it appears some are tempted to cherrypick the worst parts and putting them together.
Of course, the actual lesson to be learned from this case would be that lawyers should be legally barred from participation in any way in what the legislative branch does, as they're not interested in jurisprudece per se, only in how to corrupt the legal code in such a way as to make as much money as possible from it. And, as we as a society pay the final economic bills of a defective legal code, it's far past time to kick them out.
But it's not like that's really news.
"Having sole rights to a particular work doesn't really make a monopoly except in a rediculously narrow view."
The breadth of a monopoly is dependent on the product specification, not on any specific inherent breadth attribute.
For example, a monopoly on aluminium is not a monopoly on construction materials. It is nevertheless a monopoly, and the economic effect remains in effect. The aluminium does not get produced and sold at the most competetive and economically efficient price. Any and all products whose specifications require actual aluminium will inherit the inefficiencies, and the total wealth of the economy will be lower than what it would have been if the aluminium had been competetively produced. There's less economic damage than if someone had had a monopoly on all construction materials, but the damage remains.
The money spent paying for the monopoly derived higher costs would otherwise have been spent in other parts of the economy.
"Free market does not prevent other publishers and authors from making similar books that teach the same thing with equivalent words and pictures."
Unless they for all intents and purposes can replace the original for the consumer, and are not themselves subject to the same monopoly inefficiencies, that doesnt remove the economic damage.
Lets play a mind game. Take that $200 book and calculate the cheapest way it could possibly have been produced. Allow factors that some consumers would have been satisfied with downloading the text, others would have wanted it in paper, but would have been satisfied with lower quality paper and black/white printing only. Say, maybe on average the cost would fall to maybe $5-$20 per copy. Now take those $180 and multiply it by the number of copies sold and insert that into the economy as money available to purchase other items instead.
Now, from that little mind game, extrapolate to the entire intellectual monopoly business and calculate the total loss to the economy.
"but you seem to advocate stripping them of that priviledge."
Not really. I advocate subjecting the intellectual monopoly segments to the same free market rules that everyone else has to live with, because the damage caused by monopolistic exceptions is too large and will only grow in the future.
That's not necessarily incompatible with authors having a certain amount of control, or getting paid for their work. For a wild example of how one compatible system could work; instead of monopoly control, authors (and anyone else involved in the production) could get attritbution credits, which would then pay out on a per-person-copy basis over a certain amount of time. You could write a book, anyone copying or printing it would simply note that a copy for them was made, and you could claim a check for the number of copies made. Financing of the system could be through a printing tax or system of your choice; if the price of a book falls from $200 to $20, I suspect we could afford a small cost there.
Anyone who has an IPv4 address has an entire block of IPv6 addesses. With 6to4 you dont need any support from your ISP (well, as long as they're not actively blocking such traffic).
"For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by prepending 2002 (hex) to the IPv4 address. Thus for the global IPv4 address 207.142.131.202, the corresponding 6to4 prefix would be 2002:CF8E:83CA::/48. (IPv4 addresses use decimal notation while IPv6 addresses use hexadecimal notation). This gives a total prefix length of 48 bits, the same as an end site is supposed to be allocated under normal IPv6 address alocation leaving room for a 16 bit subnet field and a 64 bit address within the subnet." - Quote from Wikipedia 6to4 entry
You're not paying $200 because it costs $200 for the most cost effective producer to produce the book. You're paying $200 because that's what the only legal producer of the book knows that enough students will pay when their only alternative is to go without the book.
That's the essential difference between a free market and a monopoly. In a free market, competition will set the price near the cost of producing the book. In a monopoly market, the monopoly owner sets the price at the point where many consumers can just barely afford the product, because that's what maximizes total revenue. In one situation, the cost of production has something to do with the price, in the other it has nothing to do with the price.
So, for all you know, and for all you can do, the publishers may be snorting coke for your money. It's not like you can legally obtain a version of that specific book from someone who's actually checked the facts, or who's selling it for $5 when all they're doing is paying for a print run.
"Why do we need RFID for passports anyway?"
Otherwise the biometrics and RFID scammers couldnt sell billions of dollars worth of useless equipment to governments who want to appear to be doing something.
It's simply a good way to separate the taxpayers from their money.
Will they repeat that claim of 90% accuracy while taking an fMRI?
"Which is why natural monopolies like that should be state-owned."
Not entirely true. The infrastructure itself serves society best as a collectively owned commons; the wires, the pipes, the roads, the rails, the cables and data/voice carriers. Redunancy beyond such designed for availablity is pointless waste, you dont need two electricity grids, two streets to every house or two cell phone networks. You need a single one that works well.
However, the services provided over them, and the maintenance of them and construction of them, are better off being subjected to competition. Having many companies selling electricity on the common grid, many providers selling cellular phone and data services over a common network, and many companies and individuals providing transport on the roads creates lower prices and adaption to demand, optimizing the utilization of resources available.
Of course, if those conservatives had actually considered the economic implications of intellectual monopolies, and realized that their actual nature was similar to product taxation, they might come to the conclusion that state supported monopolies are actually not at all "business friendly".
In fact, the concept of the state supported 'intellectual property' has more in common with the idea of state owned means of production than it has with a capitalist free market.
These days one could design hardware that will only load signed code. Think RIAALinux running on an RIAA certified RIAABios compatible PC. Change the code so the protection is stripped out, and the hardware simply will refuse to run the code at all, as it would no longer be correctly signed. You'd have GPL code which would be effectively unmodifiable...
"software patents aren't instantly fatal."
All patents are instantly damaging. As legal monopoly rights the existence of patents slow down adoption of innovation and, as such, slows down innovation in society as a whole. It creates an incentive for protecting, enhancing, and investing in the value of the monopoly as such, through marketing, litigation, lock-in, tie-in and other rent-seeking behaviour, not for the investment in R&D. As such, they are the antithesis of a free market, constantly raising the cost of production rather than lowering it.
True. Therefore, to reach a satisfying compromise, lets take the position that all 'intellectual property' whatsoever must be immediately and retroactively declared invalid without any transition period, and any and all ill-gotten license fees and price gouging of any sort attributable to such illegitimate monopoly legislation shall be immediately refunded.
Some form of middle ground from that point of view and their point of view might even be somewhat remotely acceptable...
'the case for software patents is strongly reminiscent of the case for "Intelligent Design"'
The case for patents in general, you mean. The effects are just very much more obvious when you have an segment that has previously been spared from them.
"It would get noisy eventually though, and the fans would need to be replaced every once in a while."
:). In my experience you'd have to eventually replace both some of the drives and the fans, and the wear on the mechanical components would be worse the more thermal dissipation you need as you'd probably get varied thermal expansion in different places. It would be fine for a server, especially if it was in a relatively dust-free environment, but not the kind of thing you'd want in your livingroom.
Yep, hence the (longterm)
It's a grossly flawed design based on old PVR concepts. A more modern system wouldnt put that many tuners in a single case; you'd distribute them over your LAN. You wouldnt have disks in a frontend system; it's more or less impossible to keep that many disks cool and (longterm) silent in a single case. You wouldnt need a fast CPU, again, post-recording compression would be distributed over the LAN.
But I suspect those decisions may have something to do with having to use SnapStream...
"I see the next incarnation of war to be a big battlebot war or something."
The biggest advantage of automated warfare is that the battlebots dont complain about the constitution, they dont have friends or relatives among the population and they wont refuse to fire on their own citizens.
Why do you think some politicians are drooling all over this kind of technology?
"I am _for_ government granting artificial protections to people/organizations that create IP"
Why?
It would be entirely possible to have a non-monopoly protective system, where, for example, you apply for a 'innovation credit patent', much like today, but instead of threatening and/or coercing every user of the invention for your money, the users would simply notify the PTO that their product contains your innovation, and the PTO would pay you.
See, for example, in your hypothetical situation where you feel your work is 'cloned'. If an OSS project imitated your product, they'd simply notify (or you could) the PTO and you'd get paid. The conflict would be removed from the system.
Even better, you could strike out on your own, and invent away, and you wouldnt even have to worry about financial muscles for litigation, marketing, distribution, etc. If you were inventive enough so that other people picked up and used what things you got innovation credits for you'd get paid.
There is the financing problem, but as the current system is financed through monopoly rent exaction, it is more or less equal to a very high product tax on new things. A more controlled financing system based on similar taxation but spread over both new and old products would add the benefit of encouraging the adoption of newer and more efficient products in the economy. It would also be far more finegrained than the current so-so many years, which somehow equates to a certain amount of money depending on economic factors, enforcement policy, etc, and has a very unpredictable and difficult to measure effect on consumers, invention, taxpayers and the economy.
A system for stimulating innovation where you could actually say 'we want to encourage more research, lets increase funding!', rather than 'uh, we'd also like to be innovative, so lets protect companies from competition...err...which accomplishes the goal by... um, well, the protected ones say it makes them more competetive... um?'.
Imagine that.
"Yes, we are _required_ to persue possible patent infringers for our patents to remain valid."
Eh, no, that's trademarks. Patents are valid or invalid regardless of enforcement (actually, they run a higher risk of being found invalid if you enforce them, since chances are higher that someone challanges them).
Of course, the EPO handing out software patents doesnt necessarily mean they're valid as long as their legal foundation is dubious. As long as that is the case, corporations and patent trolls have to be careful about what they try to enforce, or they may end up with legally worthless paper rather than probably worthless paper.
Monopolies in software markets are ultimately derived from the monopoly power inherent in intellectual property legislation. The correct free market solution is, indeed, not more regulation, but removing the fundamental legislation causing the problem.
However, it might not be enough for, say, an automated unmanned airborne cargo carrier. Or a vehicle autonavigation system.
The point is that there are potential civilian applications which need both improved resolution and a high level of guaranteed availability and accuracy. Some regions may want to move forward with such technology.
"Again, nothing unusual there."
The unusual thing is that those costs are also financed by the monopoly rent income of the patents. A specific public incentive system intended to stimulate R&D. Again; in the pharmaceutical industry, we'd get five times the R&D if we simply revoked all patents and funded the R&D part outright ourselves, and let generics producers battle it out on the free market.
The marketing, administration and other costs may, or may not, be reasonable and comparable to non-IP industry, but they sure arent necessary for the public interest purpose of the patent system.
Dont worry, they'll price themselves out of business. Like you say, we're already reachable more or less everywhere else, so the value of the service is negligable, nevermind worth what a monopoly will charge.
"It argues that the individuals that made open source a success were only figureheads and not all that important."
Actually, I read it more like it argues that the economics of collaboration around non-scarce resources, multiplied by the economics of internet communication, made the opensource/free software growth more or less inevitable. If those individuals hadnt stepped up, others would have. The fact that even in the early 90's there were several free/oss operating system projects moving along suggests that it may be a valid theory.
The wheel simply makes economic sense. It solves a particular problem efficiently, and if you have a million engineers with an itch to scratch, chances are at least a few of them will come up with an itch-scratcher.
That doesnt mean those individuals havent deserved the credit, it simply means that the success of their work is not the result of random genetics and personality, but due to significant actual changes in the economics of communication, distribution and collaboration.
Some of the cost compared with general chemical industry undoubtedly derives from that, yes, but compare with generics manufacturing. As far as I can tell, the protected segments of the industry appear to spend an inordinate amount of resources on cost of sales compared to the heavily competetive unprotected segments.