Competition, a bad?
A recent article (1) argues that competition is a bad for scientific ventures. The article asserts that the codes developed by individual groups are not shared in a competitive environment and thus are inefficiently replicated by others. This is a slippery slope.
If everybody followed one gal out of Africa who went Northwest for efficiency reasons, we would not be here today. Instead, a myriad of migration experiments based on the same template, competed against each other and the 8 billion we find today are the descendants of the victors. So if the migration out of Africa were open-sourced, they would have picked up common vulnerabilities that increased the probability of extinction.
There is no regime, where competition is a bad. Compete fairly and let the best win. Replication of code, for instance, is a cost but the success of a product is revenue, many orders of magnitude more important. Minimizing costs is not an objective that will move Science of humanity forward. Instead, it is increasing the probability of success by repeated and varied experiments.
Tacticians focused on costs will always lose.