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Comment by rst | Hacker News Reader

The Wrights might not be the best precedent to cite here -- after they got a patent on the airplane, they wouldn't license for years, until government pressure broke the logjam during World War I.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

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Early on, Langley (and the Smithsonian Institute), who opposed the Wright brothers, was funded by the military early on failed flights whereas the Wright brothers were unable to secure funding even though they had a working prototype. Considering such opposition, it seems only natural that they would be careful about the licensing of their patents. Wright brothers certainly weren't patent trolls, since trolls typically don't even have a working prototype and are uninterested in commercializing the technology.

I may be mistaken, but I don't think they ever sought "funding". In fact, they had been offered this by Octave Chanute but declined because they did not want to quit their regular business of selling bicycles. They actually tried to sell units of their fully-developed machine.

http://wifcon.com/anal/analwright.htm

What was the point of that link? It shows that even the government assumed they were asking for funding but they were trying to sell fully-developed machines, as I said.

> If the latter features are of interest to our Government, we shall be pleased to take up the matter either on a basis of providing machines of agreed specification, at a contract price, or, of furnishing all the scientific and practical information we have accumulated in these years of experience, together with a license to use our patents; thus putting the Government in a position to operate on its own account.

I took this to mean that they were inquiring whether the government would be interested in a system manufactured according to specifications agreed to by both parties (or just providing the IP according to a license agreement), not necessarily for a pre-existing system. Necessary modifications to a system do not make for a fully developed machine.

If you're implying that the Wright brothers are not looking for R&D funding like Langley, I agree. They made that explicit in a later letter to the government. It's too bad that the government gave funding to Langley yet somehow rejected contracts to complete a working system with the Wright brothers, despite their initial successes.

I was not implying they were not looking for funding, I explicitly stated so. They were principally interested in selling units, or, as in your cited text, the means to build them. Again this is clearly not funding for development. The qualitative difference is that, unlike contemporaries, the Wrights were out to provide what they had (or were easily capable of), not what they were yet to have if given money.

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