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who is that jury who will decide what part of free code is present some proprietary system? I already know big names in trading education that are using free indicators found on futures.io (formerly BMT) and selling them for $1997. I also know big names in futures.io (formerly BMT) who reversed engineered proprietary systems and put code freely available, but those are heroes, sorry for mentioning. I also know guy in futures.io (formerly BMT), who made new trading system emulating commercial one.
What I mean all of this is meaningless waste of time trying to hold something to ourselves. We need more experience, thinkers and contributors to advance forward. So far futures.io (formerly BMT) was perfect environment for this. Let's keep it this way.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
IMHO, if it is "free", then whatever, has no value. Besides, the time, money and effort should be shared. I'm sorry to say what knowledge I have, appears minimal compared to all the posts I've read. Thanks for all the effort, loslo.
In order to reach a conclusion on this, we must be very sharp on what problem it is we're tying to solve. I, personally, like the current system we have. Having a few indicators out there for free gives people a taste of what futures.io (formerly BMT) has to offer, and given the very reasonable cost of membership, it encourages people to convert their membership to Elite once they see that the value they could get at futures.io (formerly BMT) far exceeds what they get from other sites that cost a lot more.
This really applied in my case where I recall I just downloaded one free indicator, read a few posts by a few members that had me thinking, then decided that it was totally worth it to upgrade my membership.
So, we need to ask ourselves what is it we're trying to achieve here by pondering a new system. I parsed through your original post and extracted what you highlighted as problems, but we'd need to be focused so that we apply the right solution:
- Is it the issue of other websites stealing the freely available indicators and posting them as their own, or even selling them for $$$?
Well, I don't think an elite membership fee would stop that. Besides, that's the problem faced by any site like this. Take for instance, the NinjaTrader support forum where there is a ton of indicators available for free there. You could argue the authors of these indicators have the same exporsure like the authors here. Some of their indicators were reposted here by futures.io (formerly BMT) members with due credit to the NT forum, of course. So, that's the caveat any open community like this would have to live with for the sake of sharing knowledge and open source code.
If people are having a heartburn over indicators being stolen from futures.io (formerly BMT), repackaged and sold for 100s of dollars, like we saw in one post recently, then the membership fee certainly won't stop that given the high pay off for the theives. The only way to mitigate something like that would be to have our indicator code covered by a well known license agreement that prevents it from being sold for profit. I'm thinking something like the GNU open source licensing system, but may be somewhat customized to the needs of the futures.io (formerly BMT) traders that allows them to use these indicators for themselves without being able to resell them for profit. (I don't think I saw such license agreement on futures.io (formerly BMT); my apologies if I missed it) Then, comes the problem of enforcement, where we'd have to sue the companies that violate that license agreement. It may seem like too much now, but as futures.io (formerly BMT) grows it would be feasible. I can tell you, from my day job, I have some first hand experience with that stuff, and I have seen companies avoid messing with anything covered by a GNU open source license because the liabilities are real and large for them.
- Is it the problem of controlling the trolls as you said?
I see several things that could mitigate that:
- moderation as we have here
- yes, a membership fee would help here, because at least it would discourage the casual poster who just wants to rant.
- but ultimately, the culture we have at futures.io (formerly BMT) should do the biggest mitigation here. I.e., if someone creates a negative/counter-productive post, and none of the other members honors it with a reply, that should be enough to stop such negativity from permeating the whole thread. I've seen other forums where they have threads that go on and on with negative and useless comments. It says a lot about the culture that the members of these forums have. But at futures.io (formerly BMT) you don't see much of that mainly because the negative posters know that there are moderators, and also other members might get on their case for making negative/unacceptable posts.
- Is it a problem of not having enough contribution from members?
Personally, I'd expect the contributions to come from a minority of the members, not the other way around. A lot of people come to futures.io (formerly BMT) seeking help, after trying other avenues. Given that the majority of traders in their early careers are at a net dollar loss, I'd expect them to be in listening mode only, trying to learn first, before they decide to post something not that useful or end up perpetuating a myth or a common misconception -- we do have a lot of that in trading. And it is also better than having them vent off like people do in other forums.
I wonder if we have a statistic that relates which percentage of contributions come from which percentage of the memberhip. I guess, if we are anywhere near the pareto principle where 80% of the contributions come from 20% of the membership, then we would be at an ideal situation. The reality is, even in large trading firms 80% of the profits come from only 20% of the traders; so the pareto principle holds well in this field.
I think we need to be clear on what we are trying to solve and how the solution is going to help with that problem. I'd be concerned if we apply a half solution / non-solution to what we think is a problem today, and end up turning people off for no good reason. There is value to be gained by having new members join. After all, who is to say that we got all the know-how we'd ever need among the members we have today, and no one could predict what additional value a new member brings to the table. So, stunting the growth of futures.io (formerly BMT) is something we should be cautious about.
It looks as though you've got plenty of feedback here and I'm of the view that it won't change those that really want to 'pirate' code, for a nominal fee they would still have access to it all as they ca do on a lot of other sites.
I empathize with those that have these concerns as I do however as it's been highlighted here on numerous posts, the code is only part of it and face it, they may sell a few copies but as often the case they will be exposed sooner or later for the frauds they really are....
I think only you Mike must make the final determination.
You broached 10 problem situations that exist under the current structure.
Only you as administrator are aware of these flaws.
Your generous intentions have opened a door that you never knew existed.
This situation will probably only get worse as time goes on.
i think bmt started by a few of us guys posting free lessons and indicators,in part to teach ourselves and in part to help other traders get stuff for free indicators that others charge for even though the original idea was not theirs to begin with.i rather leave bmt like it is.some free stuff and some stuff you need to pay for if the author of the indicator or idea wants to post it in elite or not...sharky
I totally agree with your suggestion to make all downloads available to elite members only. I have the feeling it will weed out most (not all) bad "apples". Go for it!
As I understand it any thing posted on the internet is considered public knowledge
It is Mikes site and not really a democracy
I for one would support whatever you decide Mike
and you cant please all of the people all of the time
Maybe there is some way to make the downloads only work on the machine that downloaded them so that any person who wants to use them for resale would at least have to rewrite the code I know that I had to supply my machine code to Ninja for example
I also think Elite is too cheap and maybe an annual fee should be implemented