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I want to believe, but there's an elephant in the way. GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came

by api 12y ago

I want to believe, but there's an elephant in the way. GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes. I've come around to the view that the basement/garage hacker who changes the world is largely a myth. It's a very popular one and a very American individualist one, but I see few if any real world examples. Most people around here have probably seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY This wasn't the product of basement hackers. It was the product of enormous amounts of DARPA money used to pay a good number of very smart people to focus on the problems of human-computer interaction full time for many years. I want to believe. Please show me the basement/indy hacker equivalent of that demo. Sure, basement hackers can make innovations... a little here, a little there. They can also do an excellent job making copies of commercial/military stuff, and in some cases the copies are a bit better than the original. I'm not saying this work has no value. But it doesn't innovate much and it certainly doesn't invent. Invention is a hundred times harder than innovation. IP sucks. It's a bad system. But consider what it is attempting to accomplish. It's trying to create a mechanism whereby really innovative work can really pay. It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward. In its present form it does a poor job of that, but that's the intent. Edit: I think the same logic also applies to startups, but to a somewhat lesser extent. Startups do sometimes have money, and can therefore focus on problems and employ people. But they must get revenue fast, which hugely limits their ability to play and experiment. As a result startups can innovate -- improve existing things -- but they generally cannot invent. Most startups that attempt to invent run out of runway and crash in the weeds. Invention seems to require a financier who is willing to throw money away, such as DARPA, NSF, etc... traditionally either nation-states or really freaking huge companies with money to burn. Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it. That's the problem that IP attempts but largely fails to solve.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago
It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward ... No, I don't think so. IP was never meant to help innovative people. IP -- at least as it was created in the last decades (before, nobody talked about IP, but patents and trademarks and ideas -- no IP) -- is a fighting term that was coined to create a new form of property -- thus, after having things and than land, now also have ideas "own-able". Ideas are no property. How can they? That is just a bad, bad word. And when you say, that the intent would be to help people with ideas, I can not consent! It is something to make investors and owners happy! To make rich people happy and steal from those with the ideas.
- api 12y ago
  It's an attempt to make ideas, inventions, etc. into something like physical goods that can be put on balance sheets like physical goods. Accountants like that, investors like that. But it doesn't seem to work very well.
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    Exactly. Ideas don't fit into their system of wealth and money -- so they try to put it into the system. But it does not fit and only brings much trouble, since ideas can not be measured. The patent system is awfully broken because of this and it will go downhills more and more if nobody stops it (it does not seem so, because the neo-capitalism is still going strong and has more might than all governments together).
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes. Really, the first thing you point out is the widget toolkits? Those really aren't the work of any of the projects you listed (with the exception of GNU and GTK+, though it's presently GNOME, which is still a subproject of GNU, but largely dominated by Red Hat). There are tons of different toolkits available, which is truly the beauty of it. The bazaar choice. I'm not sure what you're expecting. It's not like the GUI model has changed much since its inception. The fact of the matter is that a lot of proprietary operating systems owe significant debt to "basement hackers," particularly to BSDs due to their permissive licensing model. The TCP/IP stack on OS X, for one thing. As for kernels, I can't help but be reminded of the Torvalds-Tanenbaum debate. Also, the Hurd is not monolithic modular like the BSD and Linux kernels, it's a multiserver microkernel approach.
fred_durst 12y ago
IP is creating more assets. Its designed for the benefit of the asset class. You'll notice how with IP becoming less powerful with open source software etc, there came the rise of SaaS or Software as a Service. The truth is that strong IP, and strong property rights in general, are part of a system where one profits via the ownership of things as opposed to goods and services provided. That's why the asset class needed to push so hard for it. Otherwise, they all might have to go back to working as their assets will no longer be able to do the work for them, so to speak. So I wouldn't say that what IP is "attempting to accomplish" is to create invention. Its likely a lot closer to incentivising and further increasing the control the asset class has on our society. We can decide how to support and fund invention in many, many ways. IP is just there because we have decided its the asset class's decision. And the asset class would never invest in anything that did not return more assets. So if we want to keep the system of asset class control over our society, we needed to come up with something that gave the asset class more assets for technological innovation, otherwise they'd probably just run up the price of real estate and natural resources to an unsustainable point.
euank 12y ago
I find your assertion that basement hackers never "invent" silly. Heck, Google/Pagerank started in a garage, as the saying goes. The demo you link is amazing and I'm not sure anyone has topped that in or out of a company since, but using that as proof that only companies and governments can invent is fallacious. Many other statements you make are downright false or silly. For example, you say "the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac" and yet I've never seen a powerful tiling window manager on those two OSs ... certainly not before I used them on Linux. There might be similarity between some WMs and others, but there are dozens that are fairly novel. The "Basement / Garage hacker that changes the world" you say is a myth; and yet Google and Apple both have undeniably changed the world despite originating with basement hackers. Furthermore, the industry has moved to open source where it's easier for a basement hacker to do something big. At the time that video was made, you would have to create practically everything from the ground up. There was no free code to build on. Anyone might have had an idea expressed in that video, but he or she would have had great difficulty implementing it in a basement due to lack of resources to make the whole stack. Nowadays, if I have an idea, there's a good chance many components of it are already done in the open source sphere, and I can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and implement my idea with minimal work. The ability to create slow and steady progress and have such diverse bases on which to build, I think, makes the basement hacker far more possible. The jump from idea to working product is now much shorter in the software world than ever before. Next, you say "basement hackers can innovate ... but it certainly doesn't invent". I honestly don't see the difference you're drawing between innovation and invention. innovate is the verb that creates inventions, the noun. I'm just not seeing what you're trying to do by creating that false dichotomy. I also think you have the intent of "IP" a bit wrong. Patents are supposed to grant limited monopolies to people who have innovated. IP also covers trademarks and copyright which each have nothing to do with "innovative work" paying. By using IP there, you just fell into the trap of the article you're commenting on (I recommend reading it). Furthermore, you say patents are meant to reward innovative work. That's simply false. Innovative work rewards itself. If you invent something truly innovative, you'll make money selling it. If patents were only meant to reward, they would have no requirement of disclosing sufficient details to reproduce the invention. What patents are meant to do is help the economy and industry as much as possible. A patent requires an inventor to disclose his invention and gives him a limited monopoly. The disclosure is meant to allow others to use his idea to create further inventions. The monopoly is to encourage people to disclose ideas at all, not merely hoard them as trade secrets. "Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it." ... The whole point of a useful invention is that it solves a problem in a novel way. Surely people with that problem will want to pay for the solution that didn't exist before?

by api 12y ago

PythonicAlpha 12y ago

It's attempting to reward investments in really pushing the line forward ... No, I don't think so. IP was never meant to help innovative people. IP -- at least as it was created in the last decades (before, nobody talked about IP, but patents and trademarks and ideas -- no IP) -- is a fighting term that was coined to create a new form of property -- thus, after having things and than land, now also have ideas "own-able". Ideas are no property. How can they? That is just a bad, bad word. And when you say, that the intent would be to help people with ideas, I can not consent! It is something to make investors and owners happy! To make rich people happy and steal from those with the ideas.

api 12y ago
It's an attempt to make ideas, inventions, etc. into something like physical goods that can be put on balance sheets like physical goods. Accountants like that, investors like that. But it doesn't seem to work very well.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  Exactly. Ideas don't fit into their system of wealth and money -- so they try to put it into the system. But it does not fit and only brings much trouble, since ideas can not be measured. The patent system is awfully broken because of this and it will go downhills more and more if nobody stops it (it does not seem so, because the neo-capitalism is still going strong and has more might than all governments together).

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

GNU, Linux, the free BSDs, etc. have done a lot, but in the end they have only copied the work that came before them. You can see it from the surface down-- the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac, and the OS kernel is a copy of AT&T Bell Labs Unix with ideas from other newer OSes. Really, the first thing you point out is the widget toolkits? Those really aren't the work of any of the projects you listed (with the exception of GNU and GTK+, though it's presently GNOME, which is still a subproject of GNU, but largely dominated by Red Hat). There are tons of different toolkits available, which is truly the beauty of it. The bazaar choice. I'm not sure what you're expecting. It's not like the GUI model has changed much since its inception. The fact of the matter is that a lot of proprietary operating systems owe significant debt to "basement hackers," particularly to BSDs due to their permissive licensing model. The TCP/IP stack on OS X, for one thing. As for kernels, I can't help but be reminded of the Torvalds-Tanenbaum debate. Also, the Hurd is not monolithic modular like the BSD and Linux kernels, it's a multiserver microkernel approach.

fred_durst 12y ago

IP is creating more assets. Its designed for the benefit of the asset class. You'll notice how with IP becoming less powerful with open source software etc, there came the rise of SaaS or Software as a Service. The truth is that strong IP, and strong property rights in general, are part of a system where one profits via the ownership of things as opposed to goods and services provided. That's why the asset class needed to push so hard for it. Otherwise, they all might have to go back to working as their assets will no longer be able to do the work for them, so to speak. So I wouldn't say that what IP is "attempting to accomplish" is to create invention. Its likely a lot closer to incentivising and further increasing the control the asset class has on our society. We can decide how to support and fund invention in many, many ways. IP is just there because we have decided its the asset class's decision. And the asset class would never invest in anything that did not return more assets. So if we want to keep the system of asset class control over our society, we needed to come up with something that gave the asset class more assets for technological innovation, otherwise they'd probably just run up the price of real estate and natural resources to an unsustainable point.

euank 12y ago

I find your assertion that basement hackers never "invent" silly. Heck, Google/Pagerank started in a garage, as the saying goes. The demo you link is amazing and I'm not sure anyone has topped that in or out of a company since, but using that as proof that only companies and governments can invent is fallacious. Many other statements you make are downright false or silly. For example, you say "the GUIs are copies of Windows or Mac" and yet I've never seen a powerful tiling window manager on those two OSs ... certainly not before I used them on Linux. There might be similarity between some WMs and others, but there are dozens that are fairly novel. The "Basement / Garage hacker that changes the world" you say is a myth; and yet Google and Apple both have undeniably changed the world despite originating with basement hackers. Furthermore, the industry has moved to open source where it's easier for a basement hacker to do something big. At the time that video was made, you would have to create practically everything from the ground up. There was no free code to build on. Anyone might have had an idea expressed in that video, but he or she would have had great difficulty implementing it in a basement due to lack of resources to make the whole stack. Nowadays, if I have an idea, there's a good chance many components of it are already done in the open source sphere, and I can "stand on the shoulders of giants" and implement my idea with minimal work. The ability to create slow and steady progress and have such diverse bases on which to build, I think, makes the basement hacker far more possible. The jump from idea to working product is now much shorter in the software world than ever before. Next, you say "basement hackers can innovate ... but it certainly doesn't invent". I honestly don't see the difference you're drawing between innovation and invention. innovate is the verb that creates inventions, the noun. I'm just not seeing what you're trying to do by creating that false dichotomy. I also think you have the intent of "IP" a bit wrong. Patents are supposed to grant limited monopolies to people who have innovated. IP also covers trademarks and copyright which each have nothing to do with "innovative work" paying. By using IP there, you just fell into the trap of the article you're commenting on (I recommend reading it). Furthermore, you say patents are meant to reward innovative work. That's simply false. Innovative work rewards itself. If you invent something truly innovative, you'll make money selling it. If patents were only meant to reward, they would have no requirement of disclosing sufficient details to reproduce the invention. What patents are meant to do is help the economy and industry as much as possible. A patent requires an inventor to disclose his invention and gives him a limited monopoly. The disclosure is meant to allow others to use his idea to create further inventions. The monopoly is to encourage people to disclose ideas at all, not merely hoard them as trade secrets. "Invention is also hard for startups because there is little to no way to monetize it." ... The whole point of a useful invention is that it solves a problem in a novel way. Surely people with that problem will want to pay for the solution that didn't exist before?