Post by ka9q on Nov 4, 2011 11:28:18 GMT -4
That's exactly my point -- the government decides the overall direction and specific goals and provides funding and top-level management to the industrial and academic contractors who do the bulk of the work. NASA has always worked that way. So do the National Science Foundation, DARPA, NOAA, the National Institutes of Health and many other government scientific and research organizations. That's how you get private companies to do science that many not have immediate market value, but is still beneficial to society in the long run.
Sometimes the government is a prospective customer of some system or service that isn't already available on the market, so they'll contract for its research and development and make the technology generally available to the public as well. The Internet is probably the most successful example. It was originally developed to meet a specific need of the Department of Defense that wasn't already being met by existing proprietary packet switching technologies. In particular they needed a way to build a network of networks so that computers could talk to each other regardless of the specific kind of network to which they were directly attached. Because this required a lot of cooperation among otherwise competing commercial interests, this was unlikely to have ever appeared on its own.
So DARPA described generally what they wanted, granted contracts to universities and private contractors to come up with proposals, and then picked some and funded their development. The same technology turned out to be ideally suited for a general need so they made it generally available. And now the government is just one of the Internet's many users.
Sometimes the government is a prospective customer of some system or service that isn't already available on the market, so they'll contract for its research and development and make the technology generally available to the public as well. The Internet is probably the most successful example. It was originally developed to meet a specific need of the Department of Defense that wasn't already being met by existing proprietary packet switching technologies. In particular they needed a way to build a network of networks so that computers could talk to each other regardless of the specific kind of network to which they were directly attached. Because this required a lot of cooperation among otherwise competing commercial interests, this was unlikely to have ever appeared on its own.
So DARPA described generally what they wanted, granted contracts to universities and private contractors to come up with proposals, and then picked some and funded their development. The same technology turned out to be ideally suited for a general need so they made it generally available. And now the government is just one of the Internet's many users.