consistent with many other industry executives. I did some reading after my initial reply to this thread, and although the open source world has been a huge inflection point, competition is as fierce as ever.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove/paranoid.htm

i was reading thru other folks comments, and its interesting when we think about the successful superstars like Jobs, Gates, Andy Grove (only the paranoid survive). it does give me pause... at the end of the day, it is competition. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove/paranoid.htm

depending on what it is and what the market is, the answer probably is quite different. if its an iphone app, execute and publish, probably don't need to talk to anyone (i.e ifart). in regards to software targeted at corporations, i've gone thru a bit of this in the past, i've been both very open and secretive and I think these are reasonable behaviors, the problem is for someone that has not gone thru idea to success its difficult to know what steps to take and especially if they do not have access to someone else that has. i think with software though in many cases you can actually be quite open, and my experience is that after working in software for many years, there is a very long journey between ideas and turning that into revenue. also consider, even if its not new ideas, but you think you can deliver something that exist but with better value, its often a long journey. at the end of the day, push forward, get your ideas to the point where you have even generated revenue, and then profit, stay focused. if you truly think you have an idea, you can spend a little money and talk with a lawyer. i did this once, thought i had something unique, and I went to 2 lawyers to see if I would be the same or different opinions. both advised me to not patent and instead execute and compete. also keep in mind, it takes a lot more than writing the software... i think a successful software application could be delivered to 10 teams, the code already written, ready to be sold, and failure rate... might be the same as it is for software start-ups that have not written a line of published code yet.

you echoed my thoughts pretty well. i've worked in software engineering since 1984, and been on quite a few teams in large corporations and startups. i like to observe teams and i'm curious as to why teams succeed and fail. i've observed quite a few characteristics that contribute towards success and the ones that fail are obvious within the first 10 days of working on the team. i can sum it up this way though. in every successful team, there are 2 or 3 people that are the leaders of the team (whether small or large) that set the tone for everything. i've watched these people move into areas where they are not domain experts and they become domain experts. after observing these successful people, they are unique in that just about everything they work on is a success. they draw other talented people towards their work, the success feeds on itself. its similar to when we want to take a class because of the teacher, or join a team because of the coach.
in the end software is really hard, software releases are harder, running a software organization is 10 times the art that software programming is. there are lots and lots of books with information on failures and success. its hard to repeat success even when attempting to do all the right things, as there truly is an art in the terms of how teams interact with each other, how priorities are made, when they are made, why they are made.
i think the best way for people to learn how to manage software teams is to mentor under successful people. people that have repeatable successes.