“Do people really care so much about money and power that
they are willing to throw their ethics down the toilet and exploit
their fellow man? People do. Read about software, patents,
greed, and innovation in this week’s /dev/null.”
“I was researching software patents for an article I’m writing
when I went to lunch with a friend of mine. He works at a Silicon
Valley startup that operates under a cloud of secrecy. That part of
his story is pretty ordinary.”
“But his is a garage-based startup, with no desire for angels,
seeds, venture capital, or IPOs. My friend is a free software kind
of guy, and the main thing that he and his partners are trying to
do is to launch a successful Internet-based business. They think
they’ve found a new niche, the way eBay and Amazon once did. Their
product is super secret, because they want to be first to market.
But if they are successful, they want to concentrate on one core
aspect of that niche and not grow “too much.” They want to be their
own bosses, but they don’t want to be huge. They do not want to
work for The Man, nor do they want to become The Man. So their exit
strategy is neither to sell out nor to IPO, but to run their own
small business as per the American dream.”