An extremely silly question, buut...

[dmm]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Hmmm.... if tech were saleable then some people would not bother to research at all but would just buy their technologies.

Being on the 'cutting edge' woulf be very difficult because you'd have to research for yourself, keeping ahead of the 'public' tech level and preserving what you had accomplished.

I suspect most people won't like that style of game.

Sounds like reality to me! But I hear what you are saying. You'd have to arrange it so that selling tech would get you a lot of minerals and buying tech would cost you a lot of organics. In a scarce-minerals game, it would often be worth it. Otherwise, you'd have great tech, but not enough minerals to build ships that had it. So what good would it do you?
And of course only the first person to sell a tech would get paid for it. So there's an element of "chicken" to it. Who blinks first? ("Surely everyone has level one shields by now ... I could make a bundle ... I need those minerals ... If I don't sell the tech, someone else will, and I'll get nothing.")
As things currently stand, a player who starts without any good mineral planets nearby will lose automatically (against other human players).