> "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
Personally I believe that if you have something original and the idea gets "stolen", you should be proud of yourself. You've just done something good for the world[0]. What really matters for humanity is that something was done, not who did it, and especially not who did it first.
I had this happen to me and that's how I consoled myself after someone took my idea had way more success than I did. It helped that I wasn't trying to monetize the idea in the first place.
I had made a religious app for Muslims to keep track of how many of their daily prayers they had missed (since they're supposed to make them up). I called it "Islamic Debt Tracker" and it was downloaded a few thousand times: http://www.appsgalery.com/apps/islamic-debt-tracker-255723
Then someone else came around, used the same core UI, but gave it a way better name "Missed Prayers" and had more than 10x more success than I did. Now I even see the same feature and UI that I designed copied over in other apps across multiple smart phone platforms.
I just remember that my whole reason for making this was because there was no tool like this available and I wanted something like this to exist in the world. And now it does thanks to me and people are benefiting from it.
This sounds nice in theory, and perhaps if we lived in a different type of society that would even be true. We don't though, we live in the world where our rewards are tied to our accomplishments. those rewards are the incentives for us to do the work, it might not be 100% of the incentive, but it's a large part. Of course, if someone steals your idea, but wins the race, they're probably executing better. That's capitalism, that's the beauty of competition. First mover advantage is often a disadvantage. You have to pay for all the mistakes. If you're an established player, you can afford it. If you're brand new though, you might not be able to.
True. I understand the emotional impact of ideas too - every time I see someone executing on something I spent time thinking about, I feel as if I've just lost hit points. That said, I try to promote a more global view on things, because as a society, we're in dire need of more of that. Self-centered view is easy to have.
If you had a great new idea in the Soviet Union, for example, do you suppose you would be just given the resources necessary to execute it well? Of course not, and moreover the incumbent solutions were a lot better positioned to crush your novel way of doing things in order to protect their own positions than the incumbents are under capitalism.
The Soviet Union was a variation of capitalism, called state capitalism. I hope you weren't implying that they were socialists or communists in any way. We have not seen socialism, only small forms of democratic socialism. We have definitely never seen communism, only dictatorships and their one-party systems.
Back in the late 90s I worked at a US bank with an older and wiser dev who'd done long stints at DEC and IBM. HE used to comment that it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union actually did, as they were very similar organisations :) I guess Lou Gerstner was a better turn around exec than Gorbachev.
Let me state it explicitly: that "state capitalist" theory is false (and so absurd it makes me suspect you are part of some sort of Russian troll farm.) The USSR was both socialist and communist in character, and not at all capitalist.
I think it's important to remember that capitalism is a reward system, not the reward system.
If your biggest reward in life is a giant house where you can check out of society and spend your time look down on people, then you're going to have to step on a lot of toes to get it and more to keep it.
Yeah, but when it happens to something you care about it can be fucking brutal from an emotional standpoint.
Rami Ismail has talked pretty extensively[1] about this. He referenced it as one of his darker periods of game development when Ridiculous Fishing got cloned.
You also need to be concerned with the posibility that an opportunistic party will steal the idea, pattent it, and then try to monetarize it in some way that does not involve (and might even get in the way of) actual implementation.
Pattent trolls come to mind, but are certainly not the only way to do that.
>What really matters for humanity is that something was done, not who did it
I wish we lived in a society that worked that way. The unfortunate truth is that having your idea stolen means you can do something great for society and end up homeless and/or under considerable stress.
Society unfortunately gives you no simple guarantees, nor is it able to identify who to reward perfectly. So you should never tie your whole livelihood to a successful execution of a single idea. You need to have a backup plan.
True. On the other hand, we each have precious little time and likely a limited number of world-changing ideas upon which to fall back.
But, of course we should have a backup plan. I'm just not sure why we can't also be disappointed when our world-changing idea is stolen by someone else who then reaps the rewards.
Personally I believe that if you have something original and the idea gets "stolen", you should be proud of yourself. You've just done something good for the world[0]. What really matters for humanity is that something was done, not who did it, and especially not who did it first.
[0] - assuming the idea itself isn't evil.