Haloscan seems to have lost all our comments left since February 2nd. Sorry about that.

Moe, I had left a comment following your comment about open source which was one of the lost bits. One person who's spent a good bit of time thinking and writing about the economic and sociological bases for open source v. closed source is Eric S. Raymond. He has a dead-tree book named "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" available now from Amazon.com as well as probably everybody else. He also has the original essays online at http://www.catb.org. I suggest, given the economic nature of your question, starting with The Magic Cauldron.