Department of Defense and Department of Commerce to Develop Open 5G Systems

I am generally not a fan of the MIC, and I am not particularly impressed by the promise of this initiative, but I don't have any issue with an open, or a pseudo-open, or even open-with-favoritism approach to R&D.

It's hard to compete with free, but that doesn't mean the world should be stuck paying rents to proprietary vendors from now to the end of time. Sometimes your business model gets disrupted by a VC dumping a billion dollars into a money-losing startup. Sometimes it gets disrupted by a nation state dumping a billion dollars into money-losing R&D, that they then gift to their domestic firms. It's fine when Europe does it, it's fine when China does it, it's fine when the US does it.

The reason it's fine is because there's nothing about capitalism or markets that require your competitors to be profitable... Just like there's nothing about capitalism or markets which forbids arbitrary, regional advantages, be they related to your geography, your access to human capital, a unique regulatory environment, or your access to a friendly government that will subsidize your business (With grants, or R&D credits, or tech transfers, or just by buying a lot of stuff from you.)

To put another way - if some other government funded the development of a drug that cured cancer for $2/dose, I wouldn't shed any tears for the trillions of dollars of wasted R&D, and lost profits for existing vendors of cancer medication. I'd still feel that way, even if they went ahead and gifted the IP to a domestic vendor, that sold it at a hefty markup.

What was the actual purpose of ENIAC?

>Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory),[6][7] its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[8][9]

What was the first attempt at a large scale computer network?

>In 1959, Anatolii Ivanovich Kitov proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a detailed plan for the re-organisation of the control of the Soviet armed forces and of the Soviet economy on the basis of a network of computing centres, the OGAS.[6]

States have always had a strong strategic interest in ensuring they have access and control of critical technology of the time for purposes of power projection.

It's less about "the economy" than ensuring influence over strategically critical tech.

Sure seems like pursuing public source & public development might help generate some of that talent & know-how. If a nation has forgotten how to do something, or never knew in the first place (the Apollo Program), sometimes a climb is worthwhile, not only for where you get, but for what your nation learns & becomes along the way: greater. I'm in extreme favor of public-sourcing America into a nation with more more savvy & more skill at wireless connection. Get the ball rolling on getting better! Thankfully there seem like a lot of interested, civic minded folk out there, whose passion for radio-based connectivity & sharing that information is high.

Meanwhile our nation's cellular networks still run fantastically unsecure SS7, is my understanding.

Some kind of neat undertones of Secret History of Silicon Valley[1] here, except it's a different kind of protection, a different kind of guard for the world: not against military adversaries, but against our own inability to connect ourselves amid the software-run world.

[1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/