This sad story demonstrates the importance of owning your
ideas and directly benefiting from them (financially, public
recognition, etc.), instead of giving them away to people
who will like you one minute and forget you the next.
I suppose you can make some effort to get credit for them, but in a lot of areas trying to own and monetize everything can significantly distract from actually making progress. You end up spending all your time worrying about trade secrets and licensing and patents, and less of it worrying about science or engineering. It's actually a common failure case ("failure" from the scientific POV, at least) for inventors who come up with genuinely good stuff and then end up sidetracked for years with all their energy focused on ownership and licensing disputes.
I would like to second that with a simple fact that people who are good with monetizing and people who are good with science are often (but not always) a distinct set of people.
Comments
This sad story demonstrates the importance of owning your ideas and directly benefiting from them (financially, public recognition, etc.), instead of giving them away to people who will like you one minute and forget you the next.
I suppose you can make some effort to get credit for them, but in a lot of areas trying to own and monetize everything can significantly distract from actually making progress. You end up spending all your time worrying about trade secrets and licensing and patents, and less of it worrying about science or engineering. It's actually a common failure case ("failure" from the scientific POV, at least) for inventors who come up with genuinely good stuff and then end up sidetracked for years with all their energy focused on ownership and licensing disputes.
I would like to second that with a simple fact that people who are good with monetizing and people who are good with science are often (but not always) a distinct set of people.
See: Woz and Jobs.
You laud and describe the exact mindset that caused this.