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Comment by access_denied | Hacker News Reader

Specially when you are self-employed you should open up the barrier. This brings interchange of ideas. It is not only you who gives knowledge away, you also receive insights and ideas from people _inside_ your target industries. How else do you want to stay up to date in your race against an ever faster changing worldwide knowledge base?

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In fact, I am quite curious if there is a certain connection between Kirkhoffs law and opensource software (well, open-idea-software, but giving out ideas is almost as good as giving out source, but giving out source definately is more than giving away an idea). Recall, Kirkhoff's law dictates that the security of a cryptosystem must not depend on the secrecy of the system itself, but on the secrecy of the key's involved (and probably P != NP). And now, remember again: There are some ridiculous well-going open source programs (linux, gcc, ...) and even more, there are certain really well going commercial open source systems (such as mysql). Thus, I am pretty curious, if there is a similar kirkhoffs law for software (as in: the commercial success of a software can be achieved even without keeping the source secret, or something similar).

not really sure about the validity of your overall point, but at least for mysql I would say that's a one off.

most open source software is not going to be ridiculously profitable, and buyng mysql was a desperation for sun which didn't pay off.

not every startup can open source their code. some can, as reddit did, but this would not seem to be advisable from time zero, more something you have the luxury of after you dominate the brand/space.

that said, I tend to share everything knowledge related and not worry about it, trust to karma.

there are many forms of wealth.

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