Don't Steal Ideas, It Is Discouraging

I couldn't disagree more unless you want to clarify in greater depth what an "idea" is. People who think of ideas as property are literally the personification of selfishness. Their anti-altruistic thought is a stunt to creativity. We are were we are today scientifically/culturally because of the continued improvement of other people's ideas and research.

If you submit an idea, it immediately becomes public domain and can and should be copied or replicated if it can be made better and more open for the benefit of society. (To my regret), I studied law and spent as much time as I could in Intellectual Property because it was the most interesting field to me; what I learnt from my studies is how broken the entire system is.

If you are offended when someone steals you idea, then you should go invent your own internet. With blackjack, and hookers. Because ultimately, you are only where you are because of the contributions that other people have made, and if something can be clones in 11 hours, from svbtle to obtuve, then all it is is an idea.

Steal ideas, copy them, make them better, and encourage EVERYONE to pay it forward by pushing up the bar of expectations.

* =

Edit:

I came across some idea a while ago, I can't remember what it was called, something about "boycott commits", or along those lines.

The general premise is that every time you ever touch a file, you have to make it better in some way.

If you are going to do a commit to some open source project, you should make it better. Either by commenting something with more verbosity, or by optmizing how the project handles some ternary condition.

It's up to you, just make it better.

Now, imagine the entire world is an open source project, we are all in it together, we might all be running our own branches, but we all work from the same code base. When you commit you have a good chance of making my fork better too!

Want a more tangible example? Google and Facebook.

Whether or not you want to believe it, Google and Facebook are each making themselves better by copying and competing each others ideas. Google started out by looking at what Facebook had, and spotting what they are missing out in.

They then spent time developing features to fill these gaps.

They came up with Circles. They came up with Hangouts. They came up with high resolution pictures. They up with FooBar.

Well, now, Facebook came up with lists, Facetime, and recently included high resolution pictures. Whether you agree or not, this competition is all benefiting us.

So what if Obtvse copied an idea. Lets hope that is spurred dcurtis into making his platform "better".

I empathize with what you're saying, and in this case the notion of "stealing an idea" was a bit more blatant than most, but I still think two versions of Svbtle is better than one.

Let's look at some positives of what the clone did: 1) It generated buzz for both sites. And forced people to consider this idea as a legitimate product, instead of a weekend hack. 2) It validated the market. More people doing similar things suggests there's a valid space there. 3) Provided that both sites continue to operate and grow, they will continue to push eachother to do better.

I don't think the fact that the core product was copied is discouraging at all. I think it helps. I think the real problem you have is the manner in which it was copied. You nailed it with this line: "Real creative comes from a personal connection to a project or idea." <-- this is true. If the idea started with you, and you have the passion to continue executing on it, you'll stay the long haul and it will become a great product, it's your baby. Why does it matter what else is in the market? Shipping a product is half the battle - especially when you're dealing with space where there's no proprietary technology powering the product. Where real differentiation occurs is marketing execution, and that's where innovation is forced to occur.

This makes no sense at all. Ideas should be copied, redistributed, and refined by multiple parties. The execution best matched with its audience and context will do well. This post suggests that it is somehow not right for a person to draw inspiration from the work of others and then do the work independently to realize the idea. Why should I have to ask permission to access any idea or to do work by myself?

In what way isn't open better? That way everybody can build on it. Just about every open source project started as a crappy copy of something or other.

I've added an edit as of 2:45 PST. Thanks for reading and I appreciate the dialogue.