To clarify: (1) Your scenario = don't trademark, use open source license. (2) What Mozilla does = trademark, use proprietary license. (3) What Mark thinks should be done (afaiu) = trademark, use open source license.
I don't know a good way to reduce the impact in scenario (1) through legal means, but if you are worried about this, why not choose scenario (3)?
That makes so much sense. I thought you might be pulling the e-mails out of the applications manually, and having coded and used a system for processing submissions (to an online fiction magazine), I was wondering how the hell you could stand to do that for 500+ applications. Glad to hear you're keeping yourself sane ;-)
If they do that, then they should specify how to escape literal semicolons so that Robert'); DROP TABLE students;-- doesn't file a discrimination lawsuit.
Or, if they're in a forgiving mood, this will produce one e-mail address per line, regardless of delimited position, (assuming the founders were already on separate lines):
| sed -E 's/^.*[^[:alnum:]\._\-]([[:alnum:]\._\-]+@[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-]+\.[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-\.]*)[^[:alnum:]\-\.].*$/\1/'
| grep -E '^[[:alnum:]\._\-]+@[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-]+\.[[:alnum:]][[:alnum:]\-\.]*$'
The thing that struck me as really useful was the way you could use the slides to get an overview of and jump around inside a presentation. For me, that looks like a killer feature that could make me want to watch presentation videos through your viewer.
Except that the thumbnails of the slides are just too small to actually read. To make them useful for me for scanning the presentation without watching it all, I believe they would have to be big enough that the text is legible.
I've had the same reaction as boris when reading the original quote. But what he was talking about was the case where someone turns them down because of the valuation. And I can see Paul's point there, actually.
On the other hand, my understanding is that they've been hard at work since their original announcement, figuring out how their program is going to work legally and organizationally. Being willing to set themselves a tight schedule when necessary and being able to meet it might not be such a bad thing for a startup investor. :-)
I suppose I took PB's post more broadly than it was intended, then. If he was only talking about solving hard problems that don't benefit the user proportionally, I see that there's no contradiction [and have a clear answer to the question of when to follow which advice ;-)].
That made a lot of sense to me. But on the other hand, pg's "How to Make Wealth" makes a good argument for precisely the opposite view:
"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one."
Of course, no piece of general advice is right in all cases. But what should you look for, in a given situation, to know whether it's better to seek out the hard problems or better to avoid them?
Don't seek problems -- seek solutions. Avoid all problems :)
One of the hardest things for a big company to do is move fast. Startups typically have very limited resources, so the only way to move fast is to not spend very long on any one problem, and that's generally going to mean avoiding problems that are hard. What I'm really advocating here is that you look for the easy 90% solution that seems almost the same to the user but only take you 1% as long to implement.
"The survey did not ask where the respondents obtained the content, ignoring the reality that many were possibly downloading television shows from Bittorrent or similar services."
To me, it sound like a good idea not to ask that, if you want honest responses.
I don't know a good way to reduce the impact in scenario (1) through legal means, but if you are worried about this, why not choose scenario (3)?