The untrammeled access to knowledge is the optimal situation for the progress of research, science and engineering included.
The difficulty is that it take research and effort to come up with hypotheses and test them, and our society is designed in such a way that the researcher can only be paid if he restricts his findings.
It would make sense to have some societal system of rewards and recognition for those who successfully present useful ideas, bit then, there is the problem of separating useful ideas from less useful ones that are perhaps only a prelude to some future useful idea,
