simsim314 wrote: ↑October 5th, 2021, 8:05 pm
It's assumed by default you must publish your work without any monetization.
I would put it slightly differently. It's certainly assumed that if you do research work on CA topics, you're unlikely to get paid much of anything for it. But nobody is actually expecting you to do any such work if you don't want to do it on those terms.
For any given exciting Discovery X, I personally would very much hope that the discoverer would be an Enthusian or a Cryptopian. In fact, a Proprietarian discoverer would be likely to cause so much difficulty in the community that I'd probably prefer no Discovery X at all, over a Discovery X that a Proprietarian was trying to "own".
simsim314 wrote: ↑October 5th, 2021, 8:05 pm
If openSea minting will not solve this issue, and as I see it, people are really not into CGOL specific NFTs, then as I'm concerned I'm will personally switch to Proprietaria, just to emphasize how seriously I see this problem, and have a real discussion about the topic - unlike what we are having here, that people saying to me to the face that I should not even try and monetize any of my hard work. This is preposterous and really rude, and completely unacceptable on any artist and creator in any field where creators are investing time and effort.
That would indeed be a rude thing to say, but again it's not how I'm reading most of the responses. You started this thread as follows:
simsim314 wrote: ↑October 3rd, 2021, 12:51 am
6. Obviously this can't work without community approval and engagement. NFT has only subjective meaning, it has to be a hype so to say.
What people are saying may be hard to hear, but it seems to be a very common opinion. The "community approval and engagement" is quite simply not there -- and therefore, according to what you yourself said, that particular method of monetization via NFTs is obviously not going to work. The community's collective understanding of NFT mechanisms may be unfortunately simplistic and limited. But on the other hand they may be seeing some things very clearly, such as that it's a non-zero amount of effort to organize, maintain, pay attention to, and "hype" these things. It would in fact be a big commitment, and a change of focus in the community.
Speaking for myself only, that "hype" effort seems very likely to be a waste of time -- i.e., it seems unlikely to provide any reliable amount of monetization. That's just my honest opinion, not any kind of dismissal or insult aimed at the general idea of monetization. You're absolutely welcome to try anything that you think might work, in the way of monetization -- but hopefully you'll listen to the widespread concerns of the community, when you are depending on that same community to help you to make your plan a success.
To put it simply: I'm much more worried that the NFT proposal would bring serious distractions and difficulties into the community -- whether or not it is successful by any measure! -- than I am hopeful that the proposal will have significant positive benefits. Just for example, I'm very concerned about what the job of conwaylife.com moderator might come to look like, if CGoL NFTs along the lines of your proposal do manage to become at all popular. I don't want to be paid for my volunteer moderator work, but I
do want to avoid having that work become a complete nightmare.
simsim314 wrote: ↑October 5th, 2021, 8:05 pm
I want to have the choice, do I want to monetize my pattern or not, and not being dictated not to, as I see it it's just complete disrespect to the field and to the time and effort put into it, and to all people who are working very hard to make discoveries.
Speaking as someone who sometimes works hard to make CGoL discoveries, I'd rather you didn't try to speak on my behalf on this issue. I'm seeing serious disagreement but not disrespect in the posts here so far.
simsim314 wrote: ↑October 5th, 2021, 8:05 pm
Otherwise we will have open-source, closed-source war, where both parties will be able to use half of the patterns. I would try to avoid such state of affairs - as long as some sort of real and reasonable value monetization path is available I would prefer it.
I can't solve the monetization problem, though I'd like to be able to. It just doesn't seem to me that there's a lot of money sloshing around that can be easily tapped by would-be CA researchers. Compared to doing anything with NFTs or other monetization methods, I could work a regular job for the same number of hours, and then do whatever I wanted with the money, and come out way ahead -- in good part because I would find NFT "hype" work or any other kind of CA "sales and marketing" activity to be extremely unpleasant.
The trouble with the "open-source, closed-source war" is that if it happens, it will instantly have a terrible dampening effect on the atmosphere of collaboration that is now a fifty-year tradition. Let's say someone finds a collection of four Spartan still lifes that happens to be a color-changing glider reflector -- but decides to keep it closed source until sufficient "monetization" happens.
A discovery like that would normally mean updates to the gun collection, to slsparse, to various smallest-oscillator and SKOP collections, Pattern of the Year nominations, etc. But people do those kinds of stamp-collection updates and statistics-keeping for fun, as a community. If those things can't be done -- either because someone is trying to refuse to allow the use of some known pattern by threatening to take people to court, or because someone is hiding the details of a new discovery and only giving out information about its existence -- then we would know something better was out there, but that we couldn't use it. Suddenly all of that entertaining collaboration on optimization puzzles isn't any fun any more. Maybe we'd spend all our time trying to prove prior art on things that people were claiming as discoveries, or something horrible along those lines... but that's really just stressful and not entertaining at all, so most likely a lot of us would just drop the CGoL game entirely, in disgust.
The unintended side effects of Proprietaria should not be underestimated. If we ever get anywhere near the point where "both parties will be able to use half the patterns", as suggested, then I suspect that the community will shrink by attrition to a tiny fraction of its current size -- leaving many fewer people who will be interested in paying for anything, NFTs or otherwise.
CGoL as a mathematical recreation has been going strong for half a century now -- but Proprietaria really seems quite capable of killing it off, at absolutely no net benefit to anyone.