[Gary Dillard]

I love this question - let me open it up a little more for the big philisophical debate...I see 3 questions here.

1) At what point does the fund raiser part exceed gracious professionalism? Recall the big cheezy-poofs / Kingman collaberation debate last year - people weighed in on both sides. I posted in favor of it and it appears FIRST embraced it, so I think we'll see much more of teams working together to share the load. But when we're talking about selling rather than giving does that change the attitude? If our team has excess resources and I choose to sell them rather than donate or exchange them, does that make me a bad guy? Is it different for little team alpha who doesn't have excess resources and is using the funds to break even, versus big team beta who is fully funded and supported and is selling it to buy nicer team jackets?

2) Why is hardware treated differently than intellectual property? We see white papers all the time with detail drawings of tranny's, autonomous code, etc. - but what if team delta (or team engineer Joe Delta) said "we'll sell our tranny design for $100"? Are we expected to share designs for free since there's no intrinsic expense? If we're promoting engineering, why are we expected to give our product (the design) away as if it had no value?

3) What's wrong with individuals/companies selling stuff for a profit, not just as a fund raiser? That's how Innovation First started, sounds like Andy Baker is working towards it on gearboxes, if the market supports it, why not?

I'll answer my own questions later on, but what do you think?