> ...you should be relegated to fighting on the margins making returns in the window between your code-release and your competitors' reverse-engineering? One's

> ...you should be relegated to fighting on the margins making returns in the window between your code-release and your competitors' reverse-engineering? One's ability to profit from reverse-engineering a competitor's hard/soft/firmware is not unlimited. IIRC, if the purpose of the product of the RE isn't to be compatible [0] with the RE'd 'ware, then you absolutely have to do a dirty room RE and documentation followed by a completely independent clean-room reimplementation. This raises the cost of the endeavour by at least 2x. See, the original holder of the copyright on that 'ware still potentially has a real claim on the product of a solely dirty-room reverse engineering endeavour. Additionally, AIUI, many software licensing agreements make the situation a little more difficult and uncertain for our would-be reverse engineers. And, if the thing you're RE'ing makes use of patented material, I suspect that things get rather expensive rather fast. [0] That is, to work alongside or enhance the 'ware.