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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

If you’ve got a good idea, just build it. Don’t put any energy into trying to restrict the freedoms of other people.

Forget everything you’ve read about patents. Licenses are for losers. There is no such thing as intellectual property, only intellectual slavery. It’s a sham system that allows the ovarian lottery to persist far longer than it should. The public domain is the only game that matters.

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To echo this, every story I've ever heard of patent or IP protections making or breaking a company come across as classic exceptions that break the rules stories. These rules are made for the behemoth companies of older eras who have become institutionalized. The patents are how they negotiate their niche with the other institutions.

Which is to say, unless you're an institution or know how to play on their field, patents are useless to you and your customers.

What horrible advice. Intellectual property exists even if you choose to close your eyes and jam your fingers in your ears.

Can you design an experiment which detects whether a black box contains intellectual property?

If physics cannot detect it, how real is, it, really?

If it's just a social construct, then it's only real to the extent that people agree that it's real, and it's real only to those people who agree.

Property in general is a social construct, not just intellectual property. When I say that something is my property, that refers to social/legal recognition of my rights over that thing. Even if that thing is tangible, there is still no black box experiment that can determine whether that thing is my property or not.

That is true; however, we cannot remove a tangible thing without it being obvious that it's lacking and unavailable to the owner. As a result, more people are on board with the tangible property social construct.

Intellectual property is more like, you and I have some tangible property, and I'm not allowed to tweak my property into the a particular configuration that is exhibited by your property (or equivalent forms), without permission.

That situation also defines privacy, and also secrecy.

I suspect more people are on board with caring about privacy and secrecy, than caring about copyright.

The courts agree it’s real. You can pretend that they don’t have any power over you, but you’ll be wrong.

It really does not. The term makes no logical sense. You cannot have property rights and copyrights and patents. They are fundamentally opposite ideas.

It would be like if the tobacco industry called cigarettes “cancer reducers” and we just all went along with it. Now imagine the tobacco industry controlled every books, television and news producer. That’s what’s happened with the information industry.

If you say otherwise you’re either lying or not thinking.

Now, if you want to make money and don’t believe in ethics, I think that’s a perfectly defensible position. But if you have morals, public domain is the only right thing to do.

Yea I spend 99% of time actually working on the product, but I have been also thinking about this recently as once you choose a license it has long lasting consequences and is hard to change (i.e. Elasticsearch). Figured this thread would be a good place to have a discussion though.

That's really only because elastic was opensource, benefited greatly from that, and then changed their mind when it was no longer convinent.

I assume you are not making it open source if you are considering patenting it. Much of the complications of the elastic search case wouldn't arise in the proprietary software case.

I’d say go public domain.

SQLite did. Eats more and more of the DB world every year.

The web is public domain. Don’t need to explain that.

So is tcp/ip.

the great ones are public domain. GPL et al are a clever hack to weaponize copyright laws against themselves, but at the end of the day the solution we need is an amendment repealing Article I, Section 8 clause 8.

But isn’t PostgreSQL and (sorry if I got the name wrong) MariaDB also open source?

I think the success of SQLite is the small size / no installation, but I agree it could only become as popular as it currently is due to its open source nature.

SQLite is good and open source. I've tried MariaDB on a Python project. The connector has bugs very hard to debug. I tried to download the python source, C++ source and failed to locate the bug. I tried to add issue but find nowhere to report. Finally I give up and use MySQL instead. It works like a charm. Open source adds value, but IMHO being good is first priority.

> Licenses are for losers.

Even if you want to make your work usable by anyone without restrictions (what also have its place) you need to apply license! Otherwise it is fully copyrighted by default.

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