EFF: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

I think some societies are more interested in doing better than others than seeing improvement for all.

Well yeah, that's because doing better than others on a large scale secures your interests and in that regard the entire world has to dodge the US's swinging dick because it isn't going to be pretty when you're in the way of it. If you're hellbent on being in the way for some reason you could always try to take refuge behind Russian or Chinese Penis but either way you're surrounded by dicks. It's a damp, sweaty and hostile place and a lot of countries want that little extra oomph to help them carve out their own path.

But America is in the unique position of undeniably having the biggest swinging influence-dick and is one of the fewer countries where deciding to maintain secrecy can lower the projected increase in quality of life of its citizens.

Of course publicly funded research should be able to be kept secret for military purposes. But NASA research on engineering and construction techniques is made public.

Keeping information like that secret so it can benefit your nation seems like a good idea at first. That way America will have a competitive edge in those areas. But you run into problems quickly. You could license use of this information to all American companies, but as it is right now, anyone, citizen or not, can start their own US company.

So that system is too open to keep secrets. Plus, relatively little is produced from base resources in the United States these days. You benefit more from cheaper import than you do from superior export.

You could give the information to one or a handful of companies and let them work with it, but the government would be messing with the free market in a major way.

/r/technology Thread Parent Link - eff.org