On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 1:47 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But how do you explain the fact that many of today's top financially > successful companies rely on closed-source software? A recent example > is Google's search engine, which remains closed source.
Nobody paid Google for their idea. Nobody paid them for their prototype code. What they got paid for was *solving people's problems* -- delivering a better search service. I'm not saying every project has to be open source. I'm saying revenue will accrue to an AI if and only if, when and because it solves people's problems. If you think you can get to that stage by your own labor alone, go for it. If you think you can persuade a venture capitalist to fund you to hire a team to do it, go for it. If you think you're charismatic enough to get people to fund you as charity, go for it. If you think you can by some other method make it work as a closed source project, go for it. If not, make it open source. But whichever route you pick, follow it with conviction. If you flag your project "open source" and then start talking about protecting your ideas and trying to measure the exact value of everybody's contributions so everybody gets just what's coming to them and no more, people will avoid it like a week-dead rat. You might have the best intentions in the world, but those intentions need to come across clearly and unambiguously in how you present your strategy. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
