8 ms·

>> But in this specific field, with regards to safety and security, it needs to be out in the open. This is one of the horrors of capitalism. If there's mone

>> But in this specific field, with regards to safety and security, it needs to be out in the open. This is one of the horrors of capitalism. If there's money to be made, you can bet that if someone creates a proprietary protocol, it won't be released and will force other companies to develop their own technology to compete. Yes, it will drive competition, but I fear that it will spawn a host of different, competing technologies and make the whole industry awash in proprietary technology. In most of those cases, the people who lose are the consumers.

manarth 9y ago
Volvo's three-point seat belt and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine make good (although old) counter-examples. I'd be interested to hear if there are more recent examples.
- bluGill 9y ago
  John Deere (I work for John Deere but do not speak for them) freely licenses all safety patents except for ones that we think any competent engineer can work around. We figure we make more money from someone who buys our competitors product and because of a safety feature survives to make the decision on what to replace it with when it wears out; than we make from the person who buys something without a safety feature and as a result dies. I used to work for the company that published rfc 1223, giving away private information. The motivation is a competitor reversed engineered the protocol, and some customers had both. There was now a need to change the protocol but we knew our customers would not accept having to throw out the competitors equipment to take the upgrade. By publishing the protocol we ensured the competitor understood it and thus when the bit that was "always 0 apparently unused" changed to 1, with a change to the meaning of all following bytes they understood why it was always 0 and why the change happened and how to read all the following bytes.

manarth 9y ago

Volvo's three-point seat belt and Jonas Salk's polio vaccine make good (although old) counter-examples. I'd be interested to hear if there are more recent examples.

bluGill 9y ago
John Deere (I work for John Deere but do not speak for them) freely licenses all safety patents except for ones that we think any competent engineer can work around. We figure we make more money from someone who buys our competitors product and because of a safety feature survives to make the decision on what to replace it with when it wears out; than we make from the person who buys something without a safety feature and as a result dies. I used to work for the company that published rfc 1223, giving away private information. The motivation is a competitor reversed engineered the protocol, and some customers had both. There was now a need to change the protocol but we knew our customers would not accept having to throw out the competitors equipment to take the upgrade. By publishing the protocol we ensured the competitor understood it and thus when the bit that was "always 0 apparently unused" changed to 1, with a change to the meaning of all following bytes they understood why it was always 0 and why the change happened and how to read all the following bytes.