MIT Grad To Make Digital "SixthSense" Open Source

yuveraj writes to mention that Pranav Mistry, the brain behind the innovative "SixthSense" application demoed earlier this year, plans to open source the technology in order to get this to the streets faster. "Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. There is no report on which license he will use, but whichever one he does choose he has put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible, for all time."

Comments

Re:paid to the canard?

[icebike]

The writer assumes this single example totally undermines the argument that "Open Source and Innovation are incompatible".

First, its a strawman argument. Nobody has said that innovation is incompatible with open source, at least no one has made a compelling case.

Second its a presumption of importance way beyond the merits of the case. It is neither the first nor the most important open-sourcing of a potentially lucrative idea.

This is Slashdot. You have to expect a certain amount of grandiosity in the story excerpts.

lol

[charliemopps11]

I've never gotten paid for anything I've written. I give it all away. The reward is called "Pride" As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they devlop things like this. As long as I have a decent job that pays my bills and afords me the time to work on software, I will continue to do so. But when employment barely pays my rent and my managers expect me to come in early and work late to the point that I have no time to do anything rewarding at all, everyone suffers because I can not continue to work on things that may or may not be profitable in the end. In my opinion the biggest obstacle in the way of innovation is profit.