With all the privatisation talk going on in Greece , I have been thinking about how if IT existed before lets say 100 years it could have been included on the public sector as a proven human need such as schooling , hospitals , police , fire fighters etc.
Imagine a state-run search engine , encyclopedia , or e-mail platform.! A state-run Wikipedia , Facebook or Youtube or a public e-university!
Even things like the android market that is a very big success story could very well be state run without anything changing. All these could in principle work very nicely but having them would eventually lead to monopolisation of their domain. If “Statebook” had 70% market share it would be terribly difficult for start-up Facebook to become so successful..
On the other hand , and back to reality , Facebook has the same effect on newer social networks , Google on newer search engines and Microsoft on new operating systems , so is it any different..? The only difference is that the person on the top of the pyramid benefiting from the private enterprise does not exist in the public paradigm.
Open source software , in my opinion fits both pictures but due to the competitive and incoherent nature of private companies state funding would naturally help open source developers more. There are a lot of very useful projects out there that involve state of the art coding and are totally free , if an additional incentive existed enabling developers to be able to live out of this work instead of working another menial job , one can only imagine the quality and quantity of useful software.
Added 27-3-2012
This project http://codeforamerica.org/ kind of proves the points above 
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