alt Hacker News>That’s what standing on the shoulders of giants refers to. This is how science has always worked.
Yes, but automating and commercializing a process makes it inherently different. Just because everyone has always been welcome to drink from the village well, that countless generations have worked tirelessly to dig, maintain, and improve, doesn't mean that there's no basis for complaint when Nestle sticks a pump down it and starts draining the aquifer to bottle and sell.
The lack of an existing law (or custom) against new behavior doesn't actually render it necessarily non-grotesque.
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coder-3 • yesterday at 9:00 PM
But Nestle’s pump not only doesn’t deplete the well, it’s adding to it!
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This analogy doesn’t work. A more apt analogy is Nestle putting a pump down in the well and sucking out industrial quantities of water but simultaneously digging more wells as well. The “more wells” is more avenues for further research building on what it has proved/found.