It’s been years since I read Ben Franklin’s autobiography, but I recall him being the cleverest of men. A man who, as a child, rewrote letters over and over, not for substance, but to say things in the way he thought others wanted to hear them; who later spent a good deal of his autobiography lamenting over a purported weakness in “orderliness”, thereby distracting readers from the fact that he ascribed most other human qualities to himself.

Ben Franklin most likely weighed the costs/benefits of the patent in question below with what he would gain in historical perspective by a small showcase of generosity captured in a letter that you and I are reading hundreds of years after his death.

If Ben Franklin were alive today, he wouldn’t be an open source programmer, he’d be a lawyer at IBM telling the open source folks: “thanks for the free work, here’s a pat on the back, now I have to go make money with your code.”

Thanks for directing us to an interesting point. I agree that open source would have been a natural fit for Ben Franklin as well as for most of his contemporaries. The IP Regime, let us not forget, is a relatively new beast. Yes, patent system go back several centuries, but their current form is a very recent invention. Most true scientists and inventors throughout the ages would have felt as Franklin did.

Are you telling me that one of the most practical men in history would be an "open sourcer" if alive today? OK, I'll go with that, but I'll argue that Ben Franklin would only go with open source to the extent that its profitable, rather than follow it with blind ideology.

Historical references made by the open source community are revealing. Lets see, who would be an open source advocate. I've heard Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and a few others. But aren't these political figures? By referencing them, the open source folks are merely reasserting themselves as an ideological and political "movement" rather than clarifying anything about innovation or technology. I would find it more useful to hear what businessmen like Carnegie, Rockefeller or Vanderbilt would do in the modern technology industry...