I feel a need to point out something for this thread that, really, should give a glimmer of hope to everyone who sees the multi-million dollar operations, and thinks "There's no way I could ever compete with that!".... Yes, you can:
This is a true story, starting out in 1968, at Bell Labs in NJ. Two guys who wanted to play video games at work, took an old computer no longer in use, and ended up writing an Operating System for this old already out dated Computer. That would be Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie. What they ended up with, would eventually be called "Unix".
AT&T was actually a bigger company back then, than even now. They were considered a true giant of tech. Their Unix creation, made it's way to UC Berkeley. Kirk McKusick, and Bill Joy were both attending school there, and they got ahold of this Unix system, and loved it. They stared changing it, and adding features, and their own ideas. Of course, being in the Hacker Community, they wanted to give away what they did. So they did. the only problem, was that you needed what is called a "Source License" from AT&T for Unix, which cost something like 100,000.00 back then.
Lawyers eventually got involved, because people would call up Bill Joy personally, and ask for the "BSD Tapes" (Software at the time was distributed on Tapes for a Tape Drive) and Bill would ask simply "You have a Source License right?" the caller would say yes, he'd hang up, and send it out. The Lawyers felt this "wasn't quite rigorous enough" and eventually, AT&T went after UC Berkeley.
The code written by AT&T had been changed so much, and updated, and features added to it, that they felt they could just remove the parts left from AT&T and rewrite whatever they needed to to make it work.
AT&T tried personal attacks on the guys at Berkeley, and it did NOT end well. Eventually the Judge decided Berkeley was in the right, and had rewritten enough that it no longer matter. To humiliate AT&T, Berkeley made them pay for their advertising in Computer Magazines of the day, full page ads.
The next part of this, is when the DOD wanted to design what would be known as "ARPANET" which was the precursor to the Internet. Again UC Berkeley was involved. With BSD of course. BBN was a huge multi million dollar company that made networking equipment, and the guys at Berkeley thought "This design is stupid...We can do better" and they did. Eventually, TCP/IP was included with the BSD releases, free of charge of course.
When the DOD looked at what the BSD version could do, they themselves ended up choosing BSD TCP/IP over the huge contract they paid for with BBN. We still use this software TODAY.
Bill Joy went on to help found Sun Microsystems. Kirk is still a member of the FreeBSD core team.
What does this have to do with this thread? Well, a college student in Helsinki was using a "Unix Like" system at the time. BSD was tied up in legal troubles with AT&T so that wasn't an option at the time. He decided he would write his own Operating System to work like Unix too, and from his college, he wrote the Linux Kernel.
No money, no millions of dollars at his disposal, none of it. Today, BSD and Linux run MOST of the Internet. Stuff written by college kids on acid. We still use it today and no one can fuck with them. They didn't have a huge lab to play with, or thousands of computers to test on, they sent it out, and allowed the Hacker Community to have source code, and make changes to it, and distribute it too.
My point is, even Apple started in a garage (by people who attended UC Berkeley of course) and they invented a "Personal Computer" that didn't require an AC room to house it. None of these inventions came from millions of dollars. They came from passion. And a lot of intelligence in what they were doing.
You don't have a Lab full of equipment to test out 1200 females ? You don't have a grow facility the size of a small village ? So what, neither did they people who have changed our world forever.
You don't need to "compete" with million dollar labs and selections, you need to be passionate about what you do, and how you do it. The Internet is still here, still running on the same stuff written back in the 70s in college campus, by "amateurs" who could barely afford tuition.
