Personally, I find it highly interesting that some of the major, truly changing innovations in my field (The common architecture standard for a PC, the internet, the web, and the various open POSIX-ish OSs, and arguably free software/open source) all came about because normal company controls WEREN'T applied.

IBM did what would be considered a massive business mistake and allowed cheap clones to be made without licensing restrictions. IBM loses, and the world gains. But had IBM followed modern practices, the resulting surge likely wouldn't have happened.

The Internet was a govt enterprise, but is definitely not JUST a govt enterprise. I honestly don't know enough about the underpinnings to say much, but it's clearly not a corporate effort looking to profit.

The Web exploded because of it's open-ness. Back when I started in the late 90s, you just hit View Source on a site and got all the info on the UI. For all that it's cool on HN to mock know-nothing web developers, the fact that someone with a text editor, an FTP client (!), and some persistence can still publish a page is a huge deal. Dropping in CGI for some interactivity that can be as complex as PRINTING TO STDOUT is remarkably accessible. I also remember what corporate networks were like then - sysadmins HATED that you could open up port 80 and a vast amount of basically unrestricted traffic to/from EVERYONE would come through. (In terms of security, they were right, but in terms of functionality, this allowed things to blossom in ways nothing before it could). Heck, MS had locked down the browser market (I recall when they declared that IE6 would be the last version of IE) - while other browsers existed, none got any real traction before Firefox, and Firefox itself was built on the decision of the defunct Netscape to open source their code.

Linux has undoubtedly changed everything - and it (arguably) only got the chance to do so because BSD was locked down in lawsuits. And BSD only came about because AT&T was prevented from doing what a corporation would normally do. And BSD and Linux only prospered because the various Unix vendors all couldn't make anything work that wasn't a nightmare of licensing restrictions. I remember what Microsoft was like in the 90s - I believe they held back innovation then, not that they spurred it. Where would we be if they only had commercial Unix vendors to compete with? Or just AT&T?

I won't have to defend the impact of free/open software to this crowd, and while there are debates as to the sustainability model for extremely large packages without corporate sponsorship, and we do have packages nowadays being born from corporate efforts, I think it's fair to say that the current situation would never have come about from pure corporate efforts alone.

I think capitalism has a lot of good points when it comes to incentives...but every time I hear someone trash a different economic system by saying that it fails to take into account human nature, I think they are doing the same with capitalism. Just because greed exists and can be used as an incentive doesn't mean that's the only element to consider, nor does using greed in one way mean that you've removed it as a concern. (See Wall Street incentives to abuse the market)