Having listened to the general hubbub of this thread in my opinion making profit your main aim, along with the "all your code belongs to me" philosophy, is unlikely to lead to success. Chris McKinstry once asked me to join his project on this kind of basis, and we all know what happened to that. Judging by the volume of text generated so far on this subject I expect that anyone joining this sort of venture will waste a lot of their mental energy determining precisely who owns what and arguing over the details of the mechanism for allocation of profits based upon contributions (does number of lines of code equal contribution, and if so is this likely to lead to a good AGI design?).
Also I expect that an AGI project motivated mainly by profit will be strongly attracted away from the main goal and instead towards narrow AI applications, which are more lucrative in the short term. To pursue the for-profit route I think you will need both a clearly defined AGI architecture and also a clear causal mechanism linking contributions to pay, which leaves little room for argument. On 04/06/07, J. Andrew Rogers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Jun 3, 2007, at 5:52 PM, Mark Waser wrote: > >> So, the share allocation is left undetermined, to be determined > by the AGI someday? > > That's what I'm saying currently. The reality is that my project > actually has a clear intermediate product that would cleanly allow > all current contributors to determine an intermediate distribution > -- but I'm really not ready to discuss (or more importantly defend) > that yet so it's better to just take it as -- Yes, it will be the AGI. You may be assuming flexibility in the securities and tax regulations than actually exists now. They've tightened things up quite a bit over the last ten years. Equity and pseudo-equity (like incentive stock options -- ISOs) should be contracted at the earliest possible time, and before either financial or delivery milestones if at all possible, if you care about the value you will actually be delivering to your contributors. Furthermore, you cannot grant equity instruments to just anyone, and pseudo-equity instruments like ISOs have a ton of rules that limit their ability to return fair value to your contributors. And then there is the what-if of dissolution, acquisition, etc in which a pre-AGI determination of equity ownership needs to be figured out -- the way you've set it up, the contributors would be entitled to squat. This kinds of things are pretty strictly regulated now, and waiting until the end to contract a stake to your contributors would be a disaster for them in terms of both their return and/or tax liability, never mind the unpleasant scenarios that can occur. I cannot imagine that a savvy person would accept deferred contracting of options and equity. It would be one of the worst possible equity stake schemes I have seen. The closest *decent* way to do what you want to do is to contract options upfront with modifying conditions and qualifications based on future performance. Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;
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