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Without patents, there's little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you

Without patents, there's little incentive to innovate unless you can throw enough money at a startup to get dominant market share before someone else copies you. I don't believe this matches what we know of history. It also doesn't match personal experience -- I've worked on open source projects because they're fun, and on trying to grow better ETL tools because they make the rest of my job easier. It probably does change who does the innovating, tho. Patents mean that instead of people innovating things to make their own lives easier, you get outsiders throwing money at trying to innovate around what they've guessed other people's problems to be.

throwawaykf05 11y ago
Curious, how innovative would you say were the open source projects you worked on? How much was it doing entirely new stuff (to the best of your knowledge), as opposed to re-inventing stuff that some project somewhere else already did? I ask because the word "innovation" has no meaning if nothing novel is being done, yet everyone constantly uses it to refer to any technical development.
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  The main one I'm thinking of is monotone, which is a distributed version control system that started to gradually lose activity after git was released and took over. The primary conceptual difference I think, is that git is federated-like-email while monotone is distributed-like-usenet. It's a far prettier model, but it makes getting consensus on who has commit privileges (or in equivalent modern terminology, what blockchain appends are valid) somewhat of a PITA (especially when the list of approved committers can change over time). We never did get that working completely, but the work done since on bitcoin probably has some useful insights. A couple other things to keep in mind, are that innovation is not quite the same as invention; and that all inventions build on previous knowledge.

throwawaykf05 11y ago

Curious, how innovative would you say were the open source projects you worked on? How much was it doing entirely new stuff (to the best of your knowledge), as opposed to re-inventing stuff that some project somewhere else already did? I ask because the word "innovation" has no meaning if nothing novel is being done, yet everyone constantly uses it to refer to any technical development.

tbrownaw 11y ago
The main one I'm thinking of is monotone, which is a distributed version control system that started to gradually lose activity after git was released and took over. The primary conceptual difference I think, is that git is federated-like-email while monotone is distributed-like-usenet. It's a far prettier model, but it makes getting consensus on who has commit privileges (or in equivalent modern terminology, what blockchain appends are valid) somewhat of a PITA (especially when the list of approved committers can change over time). We never did get that working completely, but the work done since on bitcoin probably has some useful insights. A couple other things to keep in mind, are that innovation is not quite the same as invention; and that all inventions build on previous knowledge.