Conveying innovation with less energy
Innovation is often observed when more stuff is produced from less resources. Incentives to invest in innovation are mostly to save money so that money can work on another part of the pipeline or process. One extraordinary pathway to get there is to start from something else -- to scratch another person's back instead of starting from scratch. In some fields, starting from existing work is easy and not cumbersome while in a sizable number of situations, it is hardly the case. In the software industry, source codes are the basic unit of stuff you can build upon or share with other peers. On one end, one can argue that there are public domain products, whose blueprints are not protected by anything whatsoever. That kind of creative process can be appealing because nothing restricts the flow of intellectual property and therefore the exchange rate is very high. However, because there is simply no copy protection, authors will not often select this course of actions. In the middle, fr...