Mike Hord wrote:

> I gave this some more thought as the day wore on, trying to figure
> out why it bugs me so much.  I read through some of the comments
> and one jumped out at me, by someone who had spoken to a toy
> manufacturer about the Maker-Faire events- the manufacturer was
> quoted as saying
> "I love Maker-Faire.  It's where I get most of my product ideas!"
>
> The usual FOAF and I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy
> caveats do apply here (in spades), but this in a nutshell is where I
> find the rub.
>
> The mentality in our society seems to me to have become that
> having money and commercializing an idea is a more valuable skill
> than coming up with the idea and doing the work to prove it out in
> the first place.  It's bad when you do it for your employer and all
> you get is an "attaboy", but it's even worse when a company
> you don't even work for takes the work and makes a bunch of
> money off of it.
>
> It just seems like the creators of progress in our culture are being
> relegated to the proletariat- doomed to do our best, be our
> brightest, while someone else reaps the greatest profit from our
> work.
>
> And that's as gentle as I could make that rant.

This turned out to be a far more complex story that it was originally.

All of us have seen someone who once they have seen the idea
say, "I can do that"

There are multiple levels of technical progress. All technical progress
has some form risk reward equation. Reward comes in many forms
the eureka moment, Bob's clocks running on hackers desks, the
ability to feed your family.

The risks are also varied. The FSF slow technical progress of
"Incrementing base lines steps in the right direction".

There is another kind of technical risk that is talked about less
that I can describe as the FedEx risk. Here was a business model
that was totally different  from any previous approach to the
problem. The only real way to know if it would work was to try
it. The startup threshold was very high. The reward was potentially
very reduced package transportation costs. When it worked
everyone knew that they could do that at low risk.

It is this type of technical risk with new innovative ideas that in
the long run is how the real progress is made.  For everyone
on the list it starts with the eureka moment. This type of risk needs
to be protected so at least when it is successful it provides rewards
enough to encourage others to take the risk.

Misappropriating technology is a kind of mind theft.

This group (and many news groups) actively discourages IP
theft. More good IP ideas get presented because of this. There
is a fuzzy line between the hobby I had and still have and the
business I am in. I am comfortable talking about programming
ideas that may become part of someone else's project, even their
commercial project, yet we protect the IP in our products.

Where the line gets fuzzy is when someone takes one of the
ideas that then becomes the only IP to a product or service
and I then find we are competing with our own original idea.

In the mid 70's we had a solution to this case. I worked on
a bunch of barcode projects that for various reasons we wanted
put into the public domain. We did not want the technology to
be owned by any single commercial entity. At the time it cost
about $200 to file a patent disclosure. We then had some time
to complete the filing for a patent which we never intended to
do

The patent disclosure was a very public way to establish prior
art that the patent office could not ignore. To do this now
is would be quite expensive.

Regards,

--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
http://www.bytecraft.com










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