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I dunno, Google has made hugely important contributions to open source and the practice of software engineering in general. Would we have all that if it was purely government backed? Like Bell Labs, having an effective monopoly on a new tech product has spun off a ton of innovation for technology in general.

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I think there is a difference between public funding for research (it's how majority of research is funded) and public funding for open-source software (isn't happening yet, to my knowledge, so it's an interesting and potentially powerful unexplored idea).

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