Oliver Jiang wrote:
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There are patent and copyright systems to protect your intelligence property.
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Not really. Proprietary information and guarded access are the only real protection.

Patents are public disclosures that allow others to advance beyond it without struggling through your solution's ordeal. The useful license usually owned by your company is quickly moot as someone else leaps through your patent disclosure and on to the next step. A step you might have accomplished if you hadn't been wasting time on the Patent application process. :)

Copyrights are image protections as worthless as an encyclopedia's text when rewritten into a student's term paper. Re-order a few lines and its new. Copyrights are the minimumal protections from the most flagrant cases of copying and of little other value.


Oliver Jiang wrote:
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But don't you gurus want your artwork to be appreciated by as many people as possible?

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No. About the only place you can get algorithm appreciation is in exchanging stories with other gurus. Someone that has never bumped up against a recurring problem can't appriciate the solution nor its significance. Other gurus can.


Oliver Jiang wrote:
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On today's Internet, you can see tons of open knowledge and free books. And those authors give them out free at their own cost, extraordinary contribution to human civilization!

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On the internet, bad advice weighs just as much as good advice. Its hard to tell them apart. I've made enough companies richer in my career with little enough to show for it. I'm now in it for the cash that ends up in my pocket. :)


Oliver Jiang wrote:
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OO is more important in providing a graphical documentation tool than efficient code. It simply uses the concept of a picture worths a thousand words.

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Agreed, and a Power-Point Presentation is worth 10 thousand words. :)


Oliver Jiang wrote:
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A good OO tool should decrease the amount of time in documentation and help others in faster and better understand your design.

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I only want customers to understand the system level and I only want employee programmers to understand their assigned module. I wouldn't want to train them for my competitors. I'd only trust family with the important source code - an advantage with smaller companies.

aka j