> Brunelleschi built a wooden and brick model of his plan but deliberately left out crucial details and left no comprehensive blueprints so his rivals could not steal his secrets.
This sentence makes me so angry. If you’re going to come up with a great new way of doing something then the worst thing you could do is to keep it a secret so it’s impossible to figure out how it works and it ends up forgotten.
> This sentence makes me so angry. If you’re going to come up with a great new way of doing something then the worst thing you could do is to keep it a secret so it’s impossible to figure out how it works and it ends up forgotten.
It's the case for lots of inventions, the ones which are not documented end up forgotten. I could add as an example the Russian Olivier Salad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad), where the modern recipe only comes from a sous-chef of the original restaurant which sort-of reverse-engineered the recipe, because the recipe was totally secret. We still are not sure that recipe is exactly the same as the original one.
A family "friend" growing up made the most delicious dinner rolls. But she refused to share the recipe with anyone because they were a family secret. The pure selfishness just boggles my mind.
There was a Reddit thread about secret family recipes where a lot of them turned out to be store bought stuff prepared by following the instructions on the box.
My brother worked in an Italian restaurant that claimed to have a secret Sicilian spice blend recipe they'd kept in the family for generations. In fact it was Mrs Dash in big Costco bottles.
First, we’re taking that claimat face value, second, i imagine, he may have wanted to keep it secret so that one, if anyone wanted similar structure they have to get him to do the job or two, he didn’t want anyone else to steal his thunder.
> Thirdly, it should be pretty straightforward in 2018 to work out the details of a design from 1418.
If we could disassemble it perhaps. But destroying priceless and unique historical monuments just to find out how they were put together is frowned upon for some reason.
Would it? I would assume that it wouldn't warrant a news story in that case. Our ancestors were only a few levels lower on the tech tree; "it must be simple" doesn't follow from that.
Everything I know about this comes from the children's book "Pippo the Fool."
Rivals refers to people competing against him in a competition to build the dome. For him to win and get to build his design it was important for him to both prove it could be built and not allow other builders to also solve the design challenge.
I assume for him getting to build the dome was more important than his design ideas being forgotten.
Bare with me before downvoting (or at least write why).
At the beginning, patents were very similar to FLOSS.
Before patents, blueprints were kept secret, mechanical design was sometimes unnecessarily complex as a form of obfuscation and if someone was able to reverse engineer a product they could copy it without giving attribution.
After patents, blueprints were publicly accessible for a reasonable fee, obfuscation was less common, attribution was given and both derivative and new designs were patented as well and therefore accessible. (Sounds like GPL?)
Patents would expire in an amount of time that, at the time, was deemed reasonable. This increased competition, knowledge sharing and helped innovation.
Today's patents (especially software ones) and copyright have the opposite effect due to high costs, legal risk, absurdly long expiration times and the ability to patent obvious or old ideas.
This sentence makes me so angry. If you’re going to come up with a great new way of doing something then the worst thing you could do is to keep it a secret so it’s impossible to figure out how it works and it ends up forgotten.