/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Given that even in the post-war US R&D was dominated by government investment.
(This is following the replacement of tariffs following the failure of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act with R&D expenditure.)
It seems reasonable that an economic system could be developed on the basis of firm cooperation in science.
This is similar to what was advocated in the reduction of "excess competition" in Japanese economic planning.
And interestingly much of the time of high speed growth MITI (the Japanese planning agency) operated effectively as if there was a "national patent trust".
By negotiating acquisition of foreign technology and encouraging sharing of this technology between firms.
In this context there is little reasons for competition in the sphere of the advancement of science, by contrast to application of this science.
(Imagine there'd be a ton of reverse engineering, and the like; and super-profits from rent-seeking with intellectual property would go way down.)
Am especially interested in software with respect to this, would firms eventually give up on obfuscation, of would it be necessary to somehow restrict access to uncooperative actors.
Given free-software is already an extremely common phenomenon even among corporate actors, such as Microsoft.

Feel free to discuss other aspects of R&D.