[Discuss] discuss Digest, Vol 10, Issue 13

[Matt Maier]

I don't see the conflict. Why would it matter who thought of it and/or
published it first? Openness depends on people publishing early and often.
The point isn't to encourage people to keep secrets until they're
positioned to extract maximum profit from exploiting the idea, the point is
to encourage people to publish ideas that are good enough for now so that
everyone else can build them into something better.

However, now that I phrase it that way, I can see how the professional open
source world might think of "openness" differently than the amateurs (for
lack of better terms). It would make sense for commercial entities to treat
openness more like a way to outsource/crowdsource technical support rather
than a way to grow their own competition.

Okay, so, I think I'm running into the my limits having never run a
commercial open source project. I'm probably not doing a good job of
adopting that perspective.

Another question, why would a panel of industry experts have to leave their
day job? Why not just make the panel big enough that individuals can be
temporarily excused? You know, in your example, you could just go get some
coffee for 10 minutes while the people who don't have a conflict of
interest arrive at a decision. I assume any kind of decision making body
like that would have to be pretty flexible. If it's successful (which is
kind of the point) then it will have to churn through submissions quickly,
especially if nobody's getting paid for their time. They would have to be
able to get stuff done even if some people couldn't make it.

How about this as an exchange of value. Lets assume the people who have a
vote on whether or not a project gets the OSHWA stamp of openness approval
are not being monetarily compensated for their time. That seems like a safe
assumption. But, they DO get to be the only people in the world who see all
of the brand spanking new technical details of open projects before anyone
else, and they get to meet all of the people pushing things forwards. In a
community where it's nearly impossible to steal an idea (because it's being
released open) getting to see things first would have a certain tangible
value that would compensate them for their time. That value would encourage
everyone to plan nice cuz if they don't they get kicked off the panel.

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Tom Igoe <tom.igoe at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Let's say someone starts a kickstarter campaign to make a new Arduino
> derivative.  They want to claim it'll be open in their kickstarter
> campaign, so they submit it to OSHWA for review approval, whatever. Let's
> say I'm on the curatorial panel for OSHWA. Now imagine Arduino (my company)
> is working on a new model very similar to the kickstarter derivative.  Even
> though we may have thought of it independently (which happens with some
> frequency), who are you going to believe when one party complains? Even if
> one party produces docs with a timestamp that's earlier than the other, we
> all know that's easy enough to be modified.
>
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