If I sounded negative or scalding to paulca or anyone else, I apologize. I intended to point out the emotiveness and lack of specificity in the common usage of the terms, leading to flamewars and discussions derailing: to show how useless it is to discuss communism vs capitalism vs any other economic model, simply because most of us do not use the terms precisely enough to make useful discussion possible. Myself included! All it does is bring out the emotions.
As discussed in other threads by many, including Dave, we are now in a very polarized world where significant nuances are by default ignored, and everything easily slips into black and white, us and them, pro or con. I say, we need to avoid such discussions (by avoiding emotive terms), because to learn and to explore, we need to understand, not get the upper hand in some emotion-based battle. Right?
To tie this firmly back to the original thread, the reasons for the Boeing failure here are practical, not ideological or political. That is, we can trace the causality chain back to the executives making decisions that could have been made otherwise without board and shareholders objecting. It is "obvious" now in hindsight that those decisions were wrong, but it really is debatable –– and I mean, worthy of discussing, especially in the context of how engineers and designers can/should effectively pass important information to executives, especially when changing the opinion of the executives is as important as it would have been here (or, say, the O-ring problem in the Challenger shuttle) –– as such decisions should be examined in the context they were made, based on the information available at that point and not afterwards.
As a related sidetrack, even companies can form co-operatives. I'm not sure if patent pools qualify, but corporate sponsorship in the form of paid developer time to open source projects do, in my opinion. Whether a company or organization does that, when relying on the products of such projects, is a similar question to whether Boeing's long-term development plans were correct –– in the "sustainable in the long term, or just maximizing short-term and executive enrichment" sense.
As such, I am very interested in the discussion, but see the use of the economic system labels as tugging it from the factual/objective/opinion-based-on-experience, towards the emotive.
Of course, as usual, I could be utterly wrong here. But I don't think so.