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.
There's this great Atlas Obscura article + HN discussion from a few months ago:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-family-recipes-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495
(... reaches into pantry for box of Hamburger Helper ...)
Not for you, generally. This is why we have to build systems and societies that reward people for sharing their innovations.
Also, source code != documentation (unless you're very lazy.)
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.
I'm not an expert in the area though, this may be an overly-simplistic interpretation.
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.
It's nice to be indispensable though.
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.