>Tord Eriksson wrote:
"In my younger years I worked at a famous design department and I assure you that copying goes on all the time."
Its a normal design tool. One of my first electronics textbooks talked about it as the primary design tool -- they actually used the word plagurism in a tounge-in-cheek context. They said that as this was a textbook the student was expected to do everything from first principles but this wasn't how things were done in real life.
When the Russians stole the general arrangement plans
of the Concorde....
A more charitable interpretation of this is that both the Russian and the English/French teams had similar problems to solve with similar tools so they came up with similar solutions. The legacy of the Cold War is such that we refuse to admit that the Russians had any signifcant technical capability -- "they must have stolen it" -- but there's ample evidence to the contrary.
There's a widely held misunderstanding about what's actually invovled in creating things that's causing inflated expectations about what an idea is and how much its worth. Changes in patent and copyright law have reinforced this, those changes being institued because they suit corporate interests (IMO). Creating the "form" is often the easy bit. Getting the form into a realizable state, getting it manufactured, getting it marketed and delivered to willing customers and supporting it is where the work is. We're getting lazy -- we expect others to do this for us for peanuts so we can profit from our genius, complaining loudly to all when people cut us out as unnecessary (you could call it the real hidden danger in outsourcing!).
Martin Usher
BTW -- LM and the companies that they sold the design "rights" to are cheeky. We (the taxpayer) have already paid them for this work. The problem isn't really LM, its the companies that bought the rights with the expectation of profiting from sub-licencing. Its our duty to make this business unprofitable otherwise we're be spending the rest of time fighing off parasitic protection rackets.
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