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I know a few academics, and they are rightly careful about sharing their ideas before they get far enough with the implementation (lab work, publications) to ensure that they will be credited.

Perhaps it is just different fields, but most academics I know (I know math from my own graduate studies and history indirectly through my wife) will talk your ear off about their current work if you express a willingness to listen much less an interest. Most of the ones I know (again math and history) aren't worried about idea stealing because they have more ideas than they have time to work on and they know that all but the most trivial ideas will take substantial work to go forward with, its the research that counts not the idea for research.

IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent.

IANAL, but this definitely fits with my limited understanding of patent law. But that does not mean ideas per se have value outside the law. This is more an indication that patent law needs to be reformed than that ideas have intrinsic value.

(Incidentally, Richard Feynman has an interesting story about how his name wound up on the patent for nuclear submarines in his book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?)

This blog post seems to have something about that: http://pospapendix.blogspot.com/2008/04/richard-feynman-stor... (it's in there somewhere, search for patent)

> where it comes to software, the execution is the idea.

I strongly disagree with that. Although ideas and execution (i.e. software) are both "nothing more" than information, they don't have much in common. Also, ideas are refined as well as changed during execution - that is, our perception of the big picture changes as we get more information about the details.

> Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products

I fully agree with that. BTW, this somewhat contradicts the first statement.

> where it comes to software, the execution is the idea.

I think that is nearly true from the customer's perspective. They (most likely) don't have any information about the idea and only know what they interact with in the form of the execution.

You quote:

>Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products

Do you or the parent have a citation?

I used to work in patents, the number of independent recurrences of the same idea in a particular field is often pretty high. All truck drivers appear to think of digital number plates for example.

Exact details may differ but I'd expect the majority of programmers to come up with a lot of crossover if implementing a well-defined idea.

It depends on what you mean by idea of course - is it "we'll make a game" or is it "we'll introduce digital scoring to board games" or "we'll allow bartering in our MMORPG".

The idea and the execution are inextricably linked even in the academic case. The ideas that your academic friends are protecting have value because they, with a reputation for execution, have decided to focus on them. I have some ideas on string theory which are precisely worthless, no matter how correct they may turn out to be.