Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

In fairness that sounds like extending capabilities of something that already exists. For personal use that should be okay. For commercial use, that would run afoul of IP -unless we’re talking about open source, though even then you might have obligations depending on the license.

If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

Now, sure it sucks that you can’t do those things you mention for ordinary use, which we should, but you are still able to come up with your own ground-up solution for commercial purposes.

View on HN

> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

Reinventing the universe every time you create something is expensive and impractical. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Indeed, this is how companies like Facebook got a head start because they created scrappers for MySpace that made the transition easier. If you try to do the same today, they will likely throw you in federal prison for "tampering" or commit lawfare so heinous it'll feel like a war crime.

> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

That's not remotely how any progress has ever been made in the history of the human race. Newton himself said he stood on the shoulders of giants. Or as Sagan said, to bake an apple pie from scratch, you have to first invent the Universe.

A clever patch to an existing thing is exactly how you get to the next big thing after enough patches.

I don't think people realize how important incremental improvements are. Before open-source software took off, everyone either licensed a proprietary library or invented an ad-hoc solution. If the proprietary library was discontinued, you often couldn't extend or improve it (and even if you could, you couldn't share your changes), so you started over, either from scratch or with another vendor redoing the same work.

This is also why we have so much e-waste: once a manufacturer ditches a product, its usefulness is permanently limited, both by law and practicality. Copyright expires eventually, but so far in the future that we'll all be dead by then.

> that sounds like extending capabilities of something that already exists.

> If you want to start from square 1, using your own IP, you should be able to.

The former is how almost all innovation and invention works. The latter is a myth.

Yes, incremental improvements is how most science gets done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com