Employees take little or no risk in 99% of cases. You are not taking a risk making 75% of your max pay at Google/Facebook/Zynga/Twitter by going to a startup. You are taking a 25% haircut to be part of something new/small/etc.

However, starting something from scratch, incorporating and putting your reputation on the line is a major risk. If you are the creator you carry the lifetime risk/reward of your startup.

The founder(s) of Friendster, PointCast and Webvan will always be remembered a certain way. As will the founders of Twitter, Groupon, Yahoo and Google.

The employees that come after them do not carry this personal risk/reward issue. They can always say "I joined Freindster and it was a great learning experience."

The founder of Friendster will have to explain for all time why they were first and failed so horribly. How they missed the opportunity to be MySpace, LinkedIn or Facebook.

That's the real difference in my mind: personal reputation risk.

IIRC, this is a misquote. The original was something like "All this talk of space travel is utter bilge. It would cost as much as a major war to put a man on the Moon." Which was more or less correct.

Modern propaganda originated during World War I under Woodrow Wilson. Americans were isolationists and didn't want any part of the war; however, the US government wanted to enter the war so it created the Creel Commission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information) to influence public opinion towards entering the war.

The Creel Commission was so effective that it was able to turn Americans from isolationists into German-hating warmongers in only 6 months. The Creel Commission operated for 2 years, and it is where the modern PR industry emerged from.

But this was almost 100 years ago, and the government, lobbyists, and PR agencies have been perfecting it ever since. We are the propaganda experts, not North Korea.

A few weeks ago, I formed an open-source project called "The Propaganda Project" (http://www.propagandaproject.org/) to build a Web service that will enable people to identify and catalog instances of propaganda techniques (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_techniques) used in mass media to effectively pull back the curtain so that it loses its persuasive effect.

For example, let's take the three 60-minute cable news programs competing at 5 PM -- Glenn Beck (Fox News), Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer (CNN), and Hardball with Chris Matthews Hardball (MSNBC).

The Web service will make it easy for people to identify and catalog instances of propaganda techniques used during each episode. Someone might see and tag in online video that Glenn Beck used a "glittering generality" at 1 min and 12 seconds into the show and an "appeal to fear" at 1 min 33 seconds. Someone else might see that Chris Matthews used a "red herring" at 1 min 20 seconds and Wolf Blitzer used a "quote out of context" at 1 min 40 seconds.

My premise is that there is a finite number of shows and an abundance of politically-passionate people that love pointing out the other-side's propaganda. Over the course of an hour-long program, people might be able to identify 30 or more instances of propaganda techniques used in each program.

If the service becomes popular, and people use it to check to see if their favorite shows are using propaganda or if the other-side is, the networks won't want to be known as the networks with the most propagandist shows so they will force the shows' producers to reduce the ratio of propaganda per episode.

This is a brand new project that's just getting off the ground so please give me your feedback, and let me know if you want to help.

At least in America, there is so little stigma associated with a failed startup that I don't see the reputation aspect of your argument. Short of flat-out malfeasance, a failed entrepreneur is far more fundable than someone who has never started a company.

Open Source is about the developers. Free Software is about the end users (or, it's supposed to be).

In reality, Free Software ends up being useful only for programmers, hackers, technical people, and well, institutions which require programmers, hackers and technical people to run and grow their infrastructure (such as Universities and Governments).

Free Software (as an ideology) offers nothing to the typical end user of, say, the iPhone. It offers a lot to Apple (the iPhone makers).