If I see this post one more time......I'll go on a killing spree through
town.
> ----------
> From: Mike Linksvayer[SMTP:ml@gondwanaland.com]
> Reply To: extropians@extropy.com
> Sent: 06 June 1999 03:12
> To: extropians@extropy.com
> Subject: Re: Value of prizes
>
> On Thu, May 27, 1999 at 03:34:54AM -0400, Brian Atkins wrote:
> > I was reading this over at Edge:
> >
> > http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/prize/prize_index.html
> >
> > regarding the usefulness of giving away prizes for certain
> > science and/or tech advances. It seems to me that in general
> > this is a good idea, although as discussed on the site there
> > are certain limitations. I'd be curious if this has come up
> > on the list before, and what the consensus (if any) was.
>
> There was a thread on prizes in 1997, available in the archive.
> I think the subject arose from a debate over whether intellectual
> property is required to spur life extension breakthroughs. Apparently
> prizes for scientific and technological breakthroughs were once
> quite common. In the aforementioned thread Robin Hanson pointed
> out that he had written a paper on science prizes called "Patterns
> of Patronage: Why Grants Won Over Prizes in Science"
> <http://hanson.berkeley.edu/workingpapers.html>, which suggests
> that grants may have won over prizes because grants can more easily
> be doled out as pork by politicians.
>
> Given that today's intellectual property regime offers a sometimes
> valuable government-backed "prize" for breakthroughs (and 99.9% of
> the time very non-breakthroughs), the obvious uses of prizes are
> to stimulate research that isn't immediately commercializable and
> to offer an incentive for not patenting potentially valuable
> technologies (e.g. first entity to do X and NOT patent it wins the
> prize).
>
> Something akin to the latter is being done in the free software
> world by the Free Software Bazaar
> <http://visar.csustan.edu/bazaar/bazaar.html>. There are a couple
> of other efforts underway which are perhaps not as grassroots and
> have not launched yet. See <http://www.cosource.com/> and
> <http://sourcexchange.com/>.
>
> --
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