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Automatic 3D Reconstruction of Scenes
Neil Halelamien writes "New Scientist reports on a piece of software by MDRobotics called instant Scene modeler (iSM), which automatically generates 3D reconstructions of scenes, using a few hundred frames from a pair of ordinary video cameras. The software uses David Lowe's SIFT vision algorithm to quickly locate common features between sequential images, for use in the reconstruction; SIFT has also been useful for generating panoramas and object recognition. MDRobotics has a demo page showing the software being used for crime scene reconstruction, along with animated GIFs of input video and the resulting 3D model."
This private company just created a useful product (this is something that even you acknowledge) and justly wants to profit from the cost of risking development of such a tool. Then the first thing you ask is how somebody can clone it and steal the idea by rewriting the code as open source, since you cannot seriously expect them to just open source their code? This is capitalism at its worst.
If this practice becomes more commonplace, all that will happen is that the tiny companies get screwed, while the big monopolies will grow. The small ones struggling to get their foot in the door will simply be cloned and bankrupted while the rich ones with enough clout and monopoly to maintain their position will continue getting rich. Your thoughts about open-sourcing new, innovative software ultimately contribute to the problem of today's marketplace and really just keep the big guys in power.
What, do you think governmental enforcement of a monopoly based on the premise of earliest discovery would be a better idea?
And what about copyright and patent law? That is exactly what the capitalism-based American government tries to do in such matters. While I agree that it is absurd to forbid cloning software, it is even more ridiculous to pass off a clone of expensive, research-intensive software as a virtue of capitalism. It is a question of development versus application. If these people developed novel techniques of generating 3d images from video, by all means they should be entitled to be the exclusive producers of this software, since the technique would have never existed had they not created it. Had they, however, simply combined a whole host of pre-existing technologies and simply made it usable, then competition is completely warranted.
I know many people on slashdot don't like to hear the truth, but some aspects of the legal system that seem so oppressive were created for a reason, a reason that is meaningful even now. If we lacked copyright law and somehow forced all software and ideas to be open source, it would be great in the short term: we'd have all kinds of nice software like this openly available. But in the long term, society would be screwed, since only a few hobbyists would bother to do research, while everybody else would be forced into a field of work where they could earn a living.