More feedback: Patents "So back to the question. Imitation, as they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Borrowing other people's ideas is as old as humanity, and is common in the business world too. But copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc have grown up as society's ways of protecting the investments that people make, so these need to be respected. Would I like to see a world where I and my colleagues do loads of research and hard thinking to develop something new and creative only to have it copied and devalued immediately after we made it available? Hardly. But that's why we have these intellectual property systems, flawed as they are. I love competition, so if someone is out there putting some heat on us, that's great. As a designer I'd prefer it if the competition was creatively moving the state of the art forward rather than cloning us, but I don't get a say in it I guess :-). I am also quite confident that we can stay far enough ahead of cloning efforts to show the value of our products."
Chris Pratley, who will now need to clone himself to keep up with feedback on his thoughtful blog posts, discusses open source.
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