> There's plenty of complexity in actually getting that code to users that can make it quite difficult for others to replicate your success. That's true when t

> There's plenty of complexity in actually getting that code to users that can make it quite difficult for others to replicate your success. That's true when the competitors are of comparable size/ability. Not necessarily equal, but still comparable on a similar scale. However, the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft easily take e.g. Redis or Postgres or Mongo or a variety of other products, and "get that code to users" by SaaS means -- which they can do at least as well as the original developer/copyright-holder, and their "vertical" integration (e.g. AWS) makes their offer superior to the original developer. (They can easily do the same without the source code, by developing their own clean-or-mostly-clean-room implementation, but the internal barrier for them to do that is much, much higher).