Hi Maurice.
Andrew M. Odlyzko appears to agree with your reasoning [in #msg-26846748] on this matter, as do many others, I've come to learn (and even agree with, if you could fathom that;).
Earlier AMO posted the following to the Cook Report on Internet, which I feel assured he'd be agreeable to my reposting here (especially since it serves to advance the awareness of his writing, which awareness-raising could itself be regarded as one of the central theme elements in this thread, to begin with):
--
Begin Andrew:
"But hasn't human life always been based on looking for ways to take
advantage of other people's contributions? And isn't this reflected
in our language? We say that General Meade "won" the Battle of
Gettysburg, and forget the almost 100,000 other Union Army troops
who did the heavy fighting.
To quote from my recent "bubbles and gullibility" paper,
uic.edu 
The many varied effects that contribute to economic progress today
were
very clearly presaged by a tale from late Victorian times, and from
the
other side of the Atlantic. There is no indication that Mark Twain
had
this in mind, but the adventure of Tom Sawyer and Aunt Polly's fence
is very prophetic. Tom, condemned to a Saturday of drudgery,
painting
the fence, had ``a great, magnificent inspiration.'' When another
boy
came along and made fun of Tom for supposedly liking to work, Tom's
response was:
Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy
get a
chance to whitewash a fence every day?
That changed the mind of the new arrival, and after a great show of
reluctance by Tom, the other boy bought himself the right to do some
of
the painting in exchange for an apple.
Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity
in his
heart. And while the [other boy] worked and sweated in the sun,
the
retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled
his legs,
munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.
There
was no lack of material; boys happened along every little
while; they
came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. ... And when the
middle
of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy
in the
morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides
the things
before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece
of blue
bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, ...
He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while--plenty
of
company--and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If
he hadn't
run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the
village.
In Twain's words, Tom Sawyer ``had discovered a great law of human
action,
without knowing it--namely, that in order to make a man or a boy
covet
a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to
attain.''
It appears that many have discovered this, including some policy
makers.
Some have likely drawn additional lessons from it. Tom Sawyer
created a
``beautiful illusion'' that induced the village boys to exert
themselves
for the public good, while feeling happy about what they paid Tom.
(And is that much different from what we observe in free software,
say,
aside from the fact that free software projects have not yet
advanced
to the stage of being able to charge participants for contributing?)
That the rewards all went to Tom was not particularly material. And
that
may be why, in recent times, so many of the material rewards of
economic
growth have gone to other creators of ``beautiful illusions.''
What's different today, in the examples cited on this thread, is that
people
are not being asked to do physical labor in hot sun, but engage in
activities
at their computer screens that are instructive and amusing.
[End] Andrew"
--
FAC
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