One way to think about the current state of hardware design is that we are super reliant upon chip vendors. But in this case the parts are poorly documented or

One way to think about the current state of hardware design is that we are super reliant upon chip vendors. But in this case the parts are poorly documented or require lots of manual work to get the most out of them, or the documentation is only given to some people, and the interplay between these parts and other parts is unclear. So many people who are ignored by the mainstream companies want that same information and once they get it will share with others. Simultaneously the people who get good support from the companies still work very hard to get their idea working. So they are not motivated to give that away. Is there a huge amount of innovation happening? Sometimes, sometimes not. So I would say having a culture within the HW community that helps support people who want to use chips that are inaccessible to most people because documentation and support is hard for a small company then that is great. But advocating that somebody who figures out how to make a novel device that uses a complex set of parts that dramatically changes the paradigm and takes years to develop is then immediately copied then we need to protect that. 20 years for a patent? Maybe that’s too long for some areas.. maybe 5 years but then enforce patents more strongly for obvious copy cats?