Voluntary exchange is the best way to organise an economy, and widely-distributed private ownership of resources and land (*including* endangered environments and habitats) is the best way to preserve them.
According to historical record, this is true. Add limited competition (i.e., encourage competition but discourage or ban monopolies and cartels), and you'll get even better results for the humans involved. It also does not exclude
commons.
Things that are still somewhat open questions –– because they heavily involve cultural details –– includes things we consider basic necessities: water, energy, waste management, and so on. Natural monopolies.
At best you are a temporary caretaker of the land.
Isn't that exactly what ownership (of land) means? It is to me.
I am personally very interested in the way open source has changed software industry. Make no mistake, even open source developers need to get paid to live; but fortunately at least some companies do see investment into the projects they rely on as useful and necessary. Mostly, it is the short-sightedness management that is the major barrier; they just cannot see the benefit of making 20
x profit in five years compared to 1
x profit in one year, especially if it involves making less than 1
x profit in the first year.
Personally, I like the model where a client requiring customization or completely custom software, agrees to an open source license. The client will always get full sources and documentation to the project, and will be able to continue its development even with a different set of developers. The developers can reuse the code under the same or a compatible license. Sometimes there are details, especially business logic that is better kept private/proprietary –– I've even signed NDAs for these ––, but there is no reason to avoid that, or to apply the same license for the entire project. You just keep the boundary clear.
The state of large software projects in Finland is atrocious. It is assumed that most projects never produce any kind of useful results, and when a project fails, the leaders don't take any flak. The same managers just shift to a different project, with zero care that millions of euros just got wasted on nothing. This should never have been allowed to become the 'norm'; it is much worse, overall, than any single 'crash' could be, because it is continuous loss of resources to players who now design their offers to public projects in a way that allows them to garner a nice profit while failing the project.
It is like code bloat on steroids, really.
Granted, I'm a toolmaker, and not a policymaker. I like to do things that let people do stuff better and more efficiently than before; and I prefer and like it when both myself and my client benefit from the interaction, even more than I prefer and like personal profit. So maybe that colors my view overmuch.