Control Freaks Make Lousy Pioneers

Groups of people are often known as committees. Unfortunately not the best place to be creative.

Heard of the 'Mythical Man Month' of course, the real innovators in the world are individuals, more people doesn't mean more ideas.

A group might be formed to do the development, but don't expect anything more than a mushup from the committee.

Even with GPL, control of the development is not given away, but held centrally for other users to feed back improvements for inclusion. Loosing control is allowing an application to fork which is non-productive, wasting effort going in different directions and loosing possible improvements.

Forgotten people allow a true innovation to be squandered. "Pioneers" are the people who history remembers and are usually the people who commercialise an idea.

Who remembers the inventor of the blue diode? He earned zip for his invention, but the company he worked for got the patent. 

I agree. Despite the fact that sharing and collaboration help to shape an innovation, the intellectual property law has played a major role that hold back many people from doing so. This reminds me of those articles about copyright wars and innovation, one of which can be found at business week on the article on "are the copyrightwars chilling innovations?"

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_41/b3903473.htm.

There are endless examples of how innovations have been born from the freedoms of people empowerment from the famouse Linux to Google. But, why do people keep come up with an endless intellectual property Law? This might be answered by the fact that everyone wants to be recognized as pioneer when they invent something or be acknowledged on their hard works. However, there are issues like people steeling ideas or conflict from having the same idea. Nevertheless, it is very unfortunate to think that the good intention of a legal protection has an effect on the development of education systems and R&D.

Hi Emiddio

Well your concerns are quite valid and true due to very nature of Internet as a platform which is highly distributed, uncontrolled, anonymous, widely available and easily accessible. Its so diverse that thinking of "universal co-operation" for creativity and innovation may simply not be possible due to heterogeneous humans in every sense who are doing so called co-operation for various reasons. Some just want to share knwoledge, some want to learn, some want to prove a point, some want to make money out of it, some want to pass time, some want to destroy, etc...you can never predict!

But what I believe is this co-operation for creativity and innovation will very well work in a particular context that is well defined. For example organization or group level or wikis, forums, social groups, etc where you define the context and its rules to certain level like the purpose of Group and you regulate it to certain level using moderators and recognize the good contributors or co-operators by giving them rankings, points, perks etc. And at the same time you can ban any unwanted soul from the group.  In such enviorment you can give right credit to true pioneers of a particular idea or innovation. Obviously if its an open community somebody else can replicate, reuse or transform your idea as we dont have such regulation at whole Internet or WWW level. But that thing will also become reality slowly as Semantic web and autonomus web agents will bring more regulation to internet and will enable wider contexts and meaningful web socities.

- Fluid. 

Great blog Rene,

Indeed, this notion of co-operating creatively instead of competing, sounds like it would be ideal. It seems to me though that some basic elements were not been thought or at least not brought up in this blog.

Firstly, how do you define/accredit the true pioneer from all those whose ideas were used in order for him to make the breakaway? Are we speaking individually or by companies?

If individually is the case (and to companies in a more general sense), then another problem arises. In order for these "models" to work effectively a good reflection upon a factor is required. That is the factor of human nature. Surely, this sounds easy yet is the most challenging problem of all. For all failing systems out there I'm confident that no consideration on this matter was processed properly. 

Even though, I'm not yet at a level where I can fully apply philosophy to socio-economical and technological issues, I can surely speculate some malfunctions. 

It all comes down to, are humans meant to cooperate creatively or if they're given that chance of "freedom" will they abuse it for their own benefits? If the second occurs, which is the most likely, then won't that prevail from people sharing their ideas?

I hope this all made sense.

Emiddio