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PhilGoetz comments on What science needs - Less Wrong
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Research usually isn't profitable when compared to other investments. The long time between starting research and rolling out a product means that putting your money in stocks or bonds has a higher expected payoff. Also, most discoveries can't be patented. Physics is inefficiently patent-free.
In other words, you shouldn't do research?
If research isn't profitable, there's something seriously wrong with the way research is being done.
Meh. Lots of industries do fine without patents.
Not necessarily. In many fields there's simply a very large gap between when an idea is discovered and when it is applied. Since most scientific research is either freely or cheaply available, and the applications happen many steps later in the process, scientific research functions as a public good, and thus has trouble deriving individual profit even as society benefits from it.
Many of those are industries with little innovation. Others rely on industry secrets. And others, like microchip manufacturing, rely on a constant arms race of new approaches so that even if one had the details of what someone else was doing, they will be already working on the next thing.
Research has a high payoff, but only a little of it is captured by the people who did the research. Research should be done, but it's a tragedy of the commons.
Sounds more like an awesome of the commons. Aren't scientists relevantly similar to OSS programmers?