Proprietary Quotes & Sayings

The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the "secret sauce" that drives each company's profitability. The problem with this invisible "black box" algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable. — Marc Goodman

Nutritionists don't stop there, because they can't: they have to manufacture complication, to justify the existence of their profession. These new nutritionists have a major commercial problem with the evidence. There's nothing very professional or proprietary about 'Eat your greens,' so they have had to push things further. But unfortunately for them, the technical, confusing, overcomplicated, tinkering interventions that they promote - the enzymes, the exotic berries - are very frequently not supported by convincing evidence. — Ben Goldacre

The turnaround, however, did not come without expensive failures. Apple had done a good job embracing the Internet, by making the process of getting access to the Web as simple as any other function of an iMac. But Apple's eWorld, a proprietary online subscription service bundled with new iMacs, was a flop, despite a friendly interface that suggested that going online could be as easy as walking from one neighborhood to the next. All it really offered was email services and a way to download software, and in practice it wasn't any easier to use than bigger services like EarthLink and AOL, which came bundled on Wintel PCs. — Brent Schlender

Women have a tendency not to give up realms once they take over new ones. We are still proprietary over the domestic realm even as we take over new professional realms, and that is a real problem. — Hanna Rosin

Twitter freaks me out. You have followers? It feels so obsessive and proprietary. — Mos Def

The question is, In what manner do we accept this world, which is a perfect gift of joy? Have we been able to receive it in our heart where we keep enshrined things that are of deathless value to us? We are frantically busy making use of the forces of the universe to gain more and more power; we feed and we clothe ourselves from its stores, we scramble for its riches, and it becomes for us a field of fierce competition. But were we born for this, to extend our proprietary rights over this world and make of it a marketable commodity? When our whole mind is bent only upon making use of this world it loses for us its true value. We make it cheap by our sordid desires; and thus to the end of our days we only try to feed upon it and miss its truth, just like the greedy child who tears leaves from a precious book and tries to swallow them. — Rabindranath Tagore

Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things. — Lewis Hyde

We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education. — Arnold J. Toynbee

Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief. — Tim O'Reilly

Even if the initial home-base advantage is hard to sustain, a global strategy can contribute to supplementing and upgrading it. A good example is in consumer electronics, where Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp, and other Japanese firms initially competed on cost in selling simply designed, portable televisions. As they began penetrating foreign markets, they gained economies of scale and further reduced cost by moving down the learning curve. Worldwide volume then helped to support aggressive investments in marketing, new production equipment, and R&D and to achieve proprietary technology. — Anonymous

You're not the only one who can get possessive. I'm very proprietary about what's mine. — Sylvia Day

Ignorance and credulous hope make the market for most proprietary remedies. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

Apple has a complex suite of proprietary technologies, both in hardware (like superior touchscreen materials) and software (like touchscreen interfaces purpose-designed for specific materials). — Peter Thiel

Bee it therefore ordayned and enacted ... that whatsoever person or persons within this province and the islands thereunto belonging, shall from henceforth blaspheme God, that is, to curse him, or shall deny our Savior Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, or shall deny the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or the Godhead or any of the sayd Three Persons of the Trinity, or the Unity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachful speeches, words or languages concerning the Holy Trinity, or any of the sayd three persons thereof, shall be punished with death, and confiscation or forfeiture of all his or her land and goods to the lord proprietary and his heires. — Peter Manseau

A good list of questions to ask your advisor will include the following: Where will my money be held? Right answer: Somewhere else! Are you a broker? Right answer: No! Are you a dually registered advisor? Right answer: No! Do you or any affiliate have proprietary investments of any kind? Right answer: No! How are you compensated? Right answer: Total disclosure in writing and never make commissions on any investment product. What are the credentials of you and/or your team? Right answer: If planning is involved, a CFP is ideal to have on the team. What is your planning and investment management approach? Right answer: The firm should follow a coherent philosophy rather than a bunch of different strategies (unprincipled) and should follow an approach that does not involve market timing or active trading. — Peter Mallouk

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software. — Fred Wilson

Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used. — David Lehman

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock. — Kevin Mitnick

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don't reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I'm very fond of it; it's done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. — Carl Sagan

As a general rule, when a new industry takes root, and the first products emerge in a wave, almost always the architecture of the product will be proprietary and interdependent in character. — Clayton M Christensen

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character. — Clayton Christensen

During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution - because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. — Clayton Christensen

You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software. — Richard Stallman

What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power. — Richard Stallman

I do find it sometimes that people project their own feelings on to the characters and I think that there is a certain amount of sexism - I mean the proprietary nature, for men and women. — Matthew Weiner

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software. — Richard Stallman

This is thrice I have been forced to retrieve my horse from your vile clutches. And why is it, mistress, you feel the need to snatch my poor beast each time?" Damn the woman if she didn't pat Horse in a most proprietary manner and look at the beast with a great amount of unwarranted affection. "Because he likes me," she said, looking back at Richard coolly. — Lynn Kurland

I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software. — Richard Stallman

Text files are readable by countless editors and utilities, are non-proprietary, are easily shared with anyone, and are guaranteed to be readable in the future. — Daniel Goldman

In addition to being an ass and a pompous prick, he was a knuckle-dragging, potentially mouth-breathing Neanderthal who felt some proprietary ownership over a younger woman he barely knew and who hated him. — Sylvain Reynard

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware. — Richard Stallman

If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%! — Tim Berners-Lee

There is nothing more mine than my writing, nothing I'm more proprietary about. — Fran Lebowitz

Proprietary stock-index arbitrage is but one aspect of program trading. Arbitrage will take place whenever there is an imbalance created in one or more markets that are similar. — John Gutfreund

In order to protect the market value of a proprietary database, the owner must prohibit redistribution of the contents - otherwise, the information would quickly leak out and be widely known. — John Sulston

So the organisation of society on the basis of functions, instead of on the basis of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest is not service but gain. It means, in the third place, that the obligation for the maintenance of the service shall rest upon the professional organisations of those who perform it, and that, subject to the supervision and criticism of the consumer, those organisations shall exercise so much voice in the government of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is discharged. — R. H. Tawney

It is when the product is not good enough that proprietary integration gives you a competitive edge. You cannot outsource and be competitively successful in this situation. But at the other end, where standard components assembled in standard ways can yield acceptable performance, you must outsource. — Clayton Christensen

The narrative for girls is that you just hang around and wait to be "chosen" and then you belong to somebody and you live happily ever after. There isn't room for more nuanced concerns about the creepy proprietary nature of that relationship model, or the breadth of what fulfillment really means for women. — Lindy West

The mobile world is very closed and proprietary just by definition. — Matt Mullenweg

In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry. — Andrew S. Grove

Proprietary software is an injustice. — Richard Stallman

His circuitry is all different, she told her twin sister. His ambition differed in essence as well as degree. Whereas with others she could tell the point at which she might assert certain proprietary rights (the very first hints of nesting behavior), with this runner there was never any question about her rearranging his priorities. This rankled her from the start. She might have the ability to make him miserable, perhaps, but she swayed him not an inch from his path. He told her as much, and she found out quickly he meant it. There was something in the ferocity of his dedication that challenged the formula of her femininity. She responded to the challenge without even realizing she was doing so. — John L. Parker Jr.

He had always been her baby, her lovely little boy; though she had watched him change and grow with proprietary pride, she had done so with an image of laughing baby superimposed on his maturing face. — Colleen McCullough

At about five I knew I was going to be an architect because my mother had studied architecture. I thought it was women's work. I had a proprietary feeling about architecture. I could own it because my mother owned it. — Denise Scott Brown

As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. — Peter Thiel

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology. — Vint Cerf

NASA should not be developing its own proprietary version of capabilities it could purchase commercially at much lower cost, especially when we know the agency's bureaucratic tendencies will be to view the commercial versions as competitors to kill. — Newt Gingrich

It is a significant fact that, of all the Christian countries, in those where the church stands highest, and has most power, women rank lowest, and have fewest rights accorded them, whether of personal liberty or proprietary interest. — Helen H. Gardener

There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily. — Jimmy Wales

Even as Camille's beauty and precocity took form, when pride alone might have nurtured proprietary feelings, she never seemed quite the child Judith was meant to call her own. — Tom McNeal

His stride was long, tall, and proud. He wore a mask of proprietary disinterest, as though everything before his eyes belonged to him and his whimsy. He looked arrogant.
He fit right in. — S.G. Night

The proprietary advantage once enjoyed by companies who assembled teams under their own roofs and used them only on their own products has been surrendered in the rush to attain some semblance of "lean, efficient" flexibility. — Cory Doctorow

Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like. — Tim O'Reilly

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary. — Jimmy Wales

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software. — Matt Mullenweg

There was something about the possession of a book that was important to me. Owning it gave me proprietary rights on the story. It meant that I could read as quickly or as slowly as I liked. No expectations, no deadlines, no proscriptions on bent spines or crumpled pages. I was not gentle on my books. I read while I ate, I read in the bathtub. At night, I rolled over on top of my books that had fallen between the covers as I dozed. For me, the worn pages and tattered covers were a sign of devotion. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, the books I read were only real when they were loved. And I understood that love was not always gentle. — Georgia Bell

Since the 1920s, virtually all continuing medical and public health education is funded by pharmaceutical companies. In fact, today, the FDA can't even tell health scientists the truth about vaccine contaminants and their likely effects. The agency is bound and gagged by proprietary laws and non-disclosure agreements forced upon them by the pharmaceutical industry. Let us not forget that the pharmaceutical industry, as a special interest group, is the number one contributor to politicians on Capital Hill. — Leonard Horowitz

The music world has taken a huge dump, so maybe there's a connection. So if Apple decided to do this, maybe they do their own version ... whatever they want to do it's a home run for music. Unless they screw it up, and try to put something on it so that they can own it - I'm calling it out, proprietary formats are not a good thing. — Neil Young

I don't feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that's quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government. — Iain Sinclair

The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives. — Matt Mullenweg

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary. — Larry Wall

Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software. — Richard Stallman

No man should have proprietary rights over land who does not use that land wisely and lovingly. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them. — Eric S. Raymond

Linking the digital and physical worlds in these ways will have profound implications for both. But this future won't be realized unless the Internet of Things learns from the history of the Internet. The open standards and decentralized design of the Internet won out over competing proprietary systems and centralized control by offering fewer obstacles to innovation and growth. This battle has resurfaced with the proliferation of conflicting visions of how devices should communicate. The challenge is primarily organizational, rather then technological, a contest between command-and-control technology and distributed solutions. The Internet of Things demands the latter, and openness will eventually triumph. — Anonymous

The real economic cleavage is not ... between employers and employed, but between all who do constructive work, from scientist to laborer, on the one hand, and all whose main interest is the preservation of existing proprietary rights upon the other, irrespective of whether they contribute to constructive work or not. — R. H. Tawney

But it's so silly, Mama!' pipes Zach, protesting with all the might of his twelve-year-old bellows and leaping to his feet, chest puffed, to fling a proprietary arm around his sister who fits so neatly in the crook of him, as if wrought for this place. He speaks for them both, though Rachel is some months his elder. — Emma Richler

The fact is that proprietary databases don't work for such basic and broadly needed information as the sequence of the human genome. — John Sulston

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software. — Richard Stallman

I'm a big baseball fan, and I feel proprietary about the Dodgers. I'm not the owner. I'm not the manager. But I feel passionate about the decisions that they make, and I take it personally when they make decisions I don't like. — Carlton Cuse

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. — Richard Stallman

I think social networking is absolutely here to stay. Now, whether or not the label will Facebook forever, depends in part, I think, on whether Facebook wants to try to be less proprietary, be more central to the operation of defining and stewarding identity online. — Jonathan Zittrain

The revolution here is from hierarchical to lateral power. That's the power shift. So increasingly a younger generation that's grown up on the internet and now increasingly distributing renewable energies, they're measuring politics in terms of a struggle between centralized, hierarchical, top-down and closed and proprietary, versus distributed, open, collaborative, transparent. This shift, from hierarchical to lateral power, is going to change the way we live, the way we educate our children, and the way we govern the world. — Jeremy Rifkin

Flash is one of those very useful, very closed, very proprietary non-weblike things that has great tools and serves a need very well. But in the long run, we see video as part of the web, and it should be handled just the way other html elements are. — Mitchell Baker

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing. — Richard Stallman

The iPad's all about proprietary apps that are supposed to be amazing on the bigger screen. — Jen Lancaster

People have a very proprietary relationship with Superman. It's important to respect the iconography and the canon, but at the same time, you have to tell a story. Once you land on who you think the character is and what his conflicts are, you have to let that lead you. — David S.Goyer

...the bioidentical cortex chip that will be implanted subcutaneously on the inside of your forearm. It is a proprietary biocircuit developed in our labs specifically for this purpose, and it is unlike any other in the world. — Sam A. Patel

The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple. — Clayton Christensen

Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power. — Richard Stallman

He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities — Karan Mahajan

The increasing white obsession with physical violation, therefore, must be taken as an integral part of the white minority's wider struggle for social control. The degree of shared interest and unavoidable intimacy which had held the two races in uneasy coexistence during the proprietary period was breaking down. Slaves were becoming a more numerous and distinctive group, and their very real efforts toward social and economic self-assertion prompted the anxious white minority to fantasies of ravishment and to concrete measures of containment. — Peter H. Wood

It's a proprietary strategy. I can't go into it in great detail. — Bernard Madoff

Not all cloud-native platforms are the same. Some are self-built and pieced together from various components; others are black boxed and completely proprietary. The Cloud Foundry cloud-native platform has three defining characteristics: it is structured, opinionated, and open. — Duncan C. E. Winn

I would imagine that if you had a media brand that is solely focused on publishing 5,000-word stories with beautiful proprietary photographs and highly-produced videos, it would be a tough thing to make that economically sustainable. — Jim Bankoff

Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the typographer in search of special treatment.In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; not it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike . Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words. — Robert Bringhurst

A lot of individuals out there carry a lot of proprietary information on their mobile devices, and they're not protected. It's a very target-rich environment. — Kevin Mitnick

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille. Here my last love died. — Evelyn Waugh

proprietary system — Nicholson Baker

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code. — Richard Stallman

Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding. — Peter Thiel

Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy. — Tim Berners-Lee

I have observed private and proprietary colleges, like the University of Phoenix, and the market they serve. And I found it intriguing the way in which they are trying to deliver the product, with more accountability, for a price. — Roy Romer