I often see students that wants to use some commercial product in an academic project. They contact a company that makes the component, and receive a quote that would be reasonable for a profit making business, but is outrageous for a university. They then turn around and develop a clone of the key piece of technology. The major difference now is that the web makes it possible to share the 'new' results. Software companies are particularly vulnerable to this -- GPL, GPL, GPL.
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What if developers started writing and shipping games that were preinstalled on a bootable CD using something like Knoppix?
I often see students that wants to use some commercial product in an academic project. They contact a company that makes the component, and receive a quote that would be reasonable for a profit making business, but is outrageous for a university. They then turn around and develop a clone of the key piece of technology. The major difference now is that the web makes it possible to share the 'new' results. Software companies are particularly vulnerable to this -- GPL, GPL, GPL.