Gallery, Projects and General > The Design Shop

A better diesel engine

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RipSlider:
There is no need to defend your honour, as I said, it was in no way meant to be upsetting to you.

What am I offering? Nothing.

What am I asking for? Nothing more than a discussion - the purpose of this board. There is no mechanism where I can demand your input.

Do I want you to design a new engine so I can make millions from it? Nope. I earn enough money that Mrs Steve can only JUST spend it by month-end unless she REALLY tries, so that's enough for me - although I suppose Mrs Steve wouldn't argue with having some more.

I have a house built by cowboys, a 7 month old kiddie who's teething and also learning to crawl, a job which takes 14 hour days and a wife who gets stroppy if we don't have a chat and a glass of wine once in a blue moon. I swear that you could GIVE me the perfect engine design, and I wouldn't do anything with it for the next 20 years, because the diary is already looking fairly booked up. Ask Circlip - he thinks the whole thing is hilarious...  :(

Before anyone reads what you wrote as an actual implication that I am some bandito - which of course you didn't mean, but can be read as much if you squint hard enough -  who's decided the next fortune is to be made in minature diesel engines, please let me re-state that this question - "how could we make a better diesel engine" was my response to your thread about the lack of innovation being shown today. That there were no new idea's and no new people entering the hobby.

So my response was "there's probably plenty of innovation possible, and people need something the are actually interested in or need" - for example, a small, more efficient diesel engine. I gave other, less mercantile options, such as flash steam. No one is going to get rich on flash steam.

Your right - people would probably end up making money out of it if a "cunning plan" actually seemed like it would work. God knows how much has been made out of PHP, or Python, or Linux or any of the other projects I've contributed to. Billions - tens of billions more likely. IBM turn over a billion dollars a year just out of Linux. Some people would find that vexing - Mrs Steve for one, but me - I just like the fact that people have gone and done interesting things with my little contribution to a great big project.  But no one can take away from me the fact that every time someone loads a page on this forum, somewhere on a server about 20 lines of MY code, along with tens of thousands of other lines of code, from hundreds of people, executes. That makes me happy.


So what if Big Company X "steals" your idea's and makes millions? If you accept that they WILL, then why get upset if it actually does happen, which it probably won't? Lets say that all the clever chaps on MadModder get together and come up with a new clever way to design a small engine. They decide to call it the "MadModder Engine" and sell plans from the site at £1 a time to help cover admin costs.

What happens? Lots of new members. Lots of people take up model engineering. All the contributors go to bed with a smile on their face. Lots of newbies discover that bothering bits of metal can be great fun. If Big Company X comes along and DOES steal it, and it's under copyLeft - then every copyleft organisation in the world pounces on them. Looking at who's been beaten by the copyleft brigade, we see Reliance - biggest company in India, TaTa - second biggest company in India, Microsoft - you know who they are and Cisco - at the time the 5th biggest company in the world. It might take a while, but the copyleft fanatics always get there. And it doesn't cost you personally a bean.

You finished with a pointer to your R+D comment, so I feel I should finish with mine.

Some people have an idea and think "I should be renumerated for this". Other people think "That's an interesting thing - lets throw it out into the world and see what cool things happen" And it could be said that people in the second group are not very bright - that they are missing a trick. And that might be true. But lets look at the internet. There is virtually no "big business" that has done ANY R+D for any of the foundation internet technologies. pretty much everything - all the "hard stuff" - has been donated for free by people who had a chat on a mailing list or a forum and then coded something up just to see what would happen - what interesting things would happen.

What would have taken literally hundreds of billions of dollars in R+D has developed pretty much during e-mails and forum posts becuase people thought it might be interesting. Every piece of technology you used to get to, and navigate around this site - from where you typed in "www.madmodder.net" and pressed enter, to the site itself, to the database, to the XML, to the HTML, the JavaScript and the PHP, even the forum code itself, to the design of the wire that links your router to the computer, was all developed in e-mails and forums, by interested people, and given to the world, for free, becuase someone might find it useful, or interesting.

For me, and I suspect plenty of others, the question is not "Will I get paid for this" or "Will Big Business come and steal my idea's" but "Is this something I'm interested in" and, if so, "hmm... I wonder how to make this thing better".

You don't have to give away your idea's. no one does. But some people don't mind doing so - they enjoy it in fact. My personal view is that as soon as you have had the idea, everything else is fairly dull - it's the thinking which is the interesting part - so I don't care if some one makes a bit of coin from it - all power to his elbow - and good for his wife and kids too.

If I ever get more than 30 seconds peace and quiet, and if I ever come up with a cunning plan about a diesel engine, or a flash steam engine, or whatever, I promise here in front of all readers, on my ( scream, snot and drool filled)  sons life, I will gleefully document it in full and with no conditions here on MM. Because I think it would make me very cheerful to think that maybe, someone, one of this group of people that I hold in very high regard, will think to themselves - "Actually, that isn't entirely stupid...." That said, those are two VERY large "if's.."


Steve

bogstandard:
Steve,

I am glad you took my post as it was meant to read, and as I keep saying all the time, share what little you have and make everyone happy. Most of the time, I am only passing on information from elsewhere, usually that which has been lost over the years, or something with very little profitable information contained within it. Really information that is only relevent to the members of this site.

But on the other hand, you have to be very careful in this world about people living off the sweat, toil and hardship or even lives of others.
It is those people I despise more than anything else in this world, and would gladly assist them to cease breathing, if only they would ask, but they never do.

There is a great difference between sharing a bit of info on a site such as this, and making those other bast fatherless people pay for any of my intellectual or physical work.

My very cynical outlook was caused by the years I spent in the employ of that American family, seeing myself being used and treated as a money making tool, rather than as a person.


Bogs

John Hill:
Gentlemen, there are many ways our brains and effort can be 'stolen' to make others richer but if we allow that to dampen our enthusiasm for what we do we may as well stay in bed all day!

It is only a few years since a government in Europe asked for a detailed functional specification for one of our products. They took this specification and after much discussion back and forth they declared this was exactly what they wanted but instead of buying from us they used our specification (complete with my spelling mistakes) as a tender invitation to all and sundry and awarded the contract to a company in their own country.  That company is now our major competitor around the world.  This sort of thing can be really annoying but dont shorten your life by worrying about it, just go onto the next thing.

At my age I accept that I have made all the millions I am ever likely to make and there are more important things.

John

BTW, my software is in use at airports and airlines in NZ, UK, Iceland, Afghanistan, Iraq, UAE, Pakistan, China, North Korea, US, Bermuda, Phillipines, Czech Republic, Australia, Cook Islands, Niue, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and there might be one or two places I have forgotten  but I still drive a ten year old ute and I do not regret any of it.

Darren:
I'm a firm believer in if you have nothing they can take nothing.......and you don't have to be a slave to pay for it either......

Almost everything I own is pretty worthless....except to me...that's the important bit.... :thumbup:

RipSlider:
Can we go back to Tinkers original question now?


Steve

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