

Don't Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging - mikeg8
http://mikegranados.com/its-discouraging.html

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chrisacky
I couldn't disagree more unless you want to clarify in greater depth what an
"idea" is. People who think of ideas as property are literally the
personification of selfishness. Their anti-altruistic thought is a stunt to
creativity. We are were we are today scientifically/culturally because of the
continued improvement of other people's ideas and research.

If you submit an idea, it immediately becomes public domain and can and
_should_ be copied or replicated if it can be made better and more open for
the benefit of society. (To my regret), I studied law and spent as much time
as I could in Intellectual Property because it was the most interesting field
to me; what I learnt from my studies is how broken the entire system is.

If you are offended when someone steals you idea, then you should go invent
your own internet. With blackjack, and hookers. Because ultimately, you are
only where you are because of the contributions that other people have made,
and if something can be clones in 11 hours, from svbtle to obtuve, then all it
is is an idea.

Steal ideas, copy them, make them better, and encourage _EVERYONE_ to pay it
forward by pushing up the bar of expectations.

* =

Edit:

I came across some idea a while ago, I can't remember what it was called,
something about "boycott commits", or along those lines.

The general premise is that every time you ever touch a file, you have to make
it better in some way.

If you are going to do a commit to some open source project, you should make
it better. Either by commenting something with more verbosity, or by optmizing
how the project handles some ternary condition.

It's up to you, just make it better.

Now, imagine the entire world is an open source project, we are all in it
together, we might all be running our own branches, but we all work from the
same code base. When you commit you have a good chance of making my fork
better too!

Want a more tangible example? Google and Facebook.

Whether or not you want to believe it, Google and Facebook are each making
themselves better by copying and competing each others ideas. Google started
out by looking at what Facebook had, and spotting what they are missing out
in.

They then spent time developing features to fill these gaps.

They came up with Circles. They came up with Hangouts. They came up with high
resolution pictures. They up with FooBar.

Well, now, Facebook came up with lists, Facetime, and recently included high
resolution pictures. Whether you agree or not, this competition is all
benefiting us.

So what if Obtvse copied an idea. Lets hope that is spurred dcurtis into
making his platform "better".

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dmils4
I empathize with what you're saying, and in this case the notion of "stealing
an idea" was a bit more blatant than most, but I still think two versions of
Svbtle is better than one.

Let's look at some positives of what the clone did: 1) It generated buzz for
both sites. And forced people to consider this idea as a legitimate product,
instead of a weekend hack. 2) It validated the market. More people doing
similar things suggests there's a valid space there. 3) Provided that both
sites continue to operate and grow, they will continue to push eachother to do
better.

I don't think the fact that the core product was copied is discouraging at
all. I think it helps. I think the real problem you have is the manner in
which it was copied. You nailed it with this line: "Real creative comes from a
personal connection to a project or idea." <\-- this is true. If the idea
started with you, and you have the passion to continue executing on it, you'll
stay the long haul and it will become a great product, it's your baby. Why
does it matter what else is in the market? Shipping a product is half the
battle - especially when you're dealing with space where there's no
proprietary technology powering the product. Where real differentiation occurs
is marketing execution, and that's where innovation is forced to occur.

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jdietrich
Children get upset when someone copies from them. Adults realise that there's
no such thing as an original idea, but there is such a thing as validated
product-market fit.

The 99c vampire romance novels on the Kindle Store don't undermine Stephanie
Meyer, they reinforce her status as a thought leader. The waves of Apple-
derived industrial design (here's looking at you, HP Envy!) entrench the
status of Jony Ive as the only designer that matters. Counterfeit designer
clothes and accessories are the reason that luxury department stores in London
are now employing Mandarin-speaking staff.

If you're not _delighted_ that people are ripping off your ideas, you've badly
misunderstood the modern market. On the internet, the worst thing you can be
is ignored. Imitation means that not only is your idea good enough to notice,
but that it's good enough to slavishly copy. The clones might get a few hits
or a few bucks, but the social capital is all yours.

~~~
mikeg8
Interesting point. Thanks.

------
kolinko
Everything's fair in love, war and business.

Ideas are meant to be "stolen". That's how progress is made. If you want to
protect your idea, make sure that you've got the best execution. There is no
benefit for society from protecting subpar executions.

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gatlin
This makes no sense at all. Ideas should be copied, redistributed, and refined
by multiple parties. The execution best matched with its audience and context
will do well. This post suggests that it is somehow not right for a person to
draw inspiration from the work of others and then _do the work independently
to realize the idea_. Why should I have to ask permission to access any idea
or to do work by myself?

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hellokhoaphan
I truly believe in taking the core concept of an idea and making it better --
if companies and start ups lag behind and leave room for innovation, why not
capitalize on it?

If a company is always progressing and improving upon it's product or service,
then this leaves less room for people to come in and steal their idea and
"improve" upon it. Even if there are copycats that come into the market and
try to improve upon the core concept, the fact that you're working to build
upon your business inspires loyalty and reach among your base of users. I
think it's these types of companies that are the hardest to compete with,
making stealing their idea even tougher to execute.

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SudarshanP
A guy who implements a closed source idea as an open implementation usually
ends up getting credit for taking the pain to implement the idea rather than
coming up with the idea. The guys who created GNOME/KDE do not get credit for
inventing the GUI. They get credit for making a usable opensource
implementation of ideas that were born at XEROX PARC and even before that.

Anyone who creates a clone of a closed app is providing the starting point for
derivative work. Even if the "first author" did nothing more than clone
functionality, subsequent authors shall build new awesome features on top of
that.

If you want to prevent OSS from getting in your way of making money, all you
need to ensure is that you care about delighting customers. For Eg consider
Google. they use android for controlling the platform on which search happens.
The linux kernel hackers actually care very little about whether ur mom can
use the phone. The non cool aspects of project get very little attention. To
run a business, all you need to do is pay as much attention to the non cool
parts of a project.

Apple still sells devices with huge margins. So all Dustin Curtis needs to do
is "be the steve jobs" of his niche. He can make money off of it, if he
chooses to, and get credit for what he creates true value from and the open
implementations can co-exist.

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vikvik
I think the concept of "stealing an idea" itself is a sort of tribute to the
person who originated it. But actually speaking ideas cannot be stolen.

What wiener did is commendable in its own right without taking any credit away
from curtis.

But before this turns into a huge thing, please, come back to the ground. This
blog idea or the style is pretty trivial. Its not as if this is linux or a
programming language or anything like that.

Were I to be in curtis's position, I might feel like I should have been in
control of all aspects of unveiling it to the public and noone must take any
credit for anything. But then I would be childish now, wouldn't I?

Have we heard from curtis yet? Maybe his opinion is completely different than
that of the article's author.

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DanBC
The value of dcurtis's idea was exclusive content from a carefully selected
bunch of people. The (IMO ugly) design of the blog or the idea of the ideas
panel are not valuable.

If dcurtis had announced his blog platform; announced his blog network; and
released the code I think he would have had a very different response. But his
approached trashed the "brand" that he wanted to protect. Just read the
comments in anythread mentioning the two products; words like "dick" occur
many times.

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mikeg8
I've added an edit as of 2:45 PST. Thanks for reading and I appreciate the
dialogue.

