if someone can do it for free, then it will be inevitably free. I agree. It's similar to reversion to normal profits through commoditization, but where the cos

if someone can do it for free, then it will be inevitably free. I agree. It's similar to reversion to normal profits through commoditization, but where the costs (labour and capital) can be donated or supported by advertising. But "inevitable" means one day it will be free. It doesn't mean "today", just that your window of opportunity is time-limited. People serious about business should then move to areas where people can’t replicated it easily, for instance by having unique technology [...] Unique technology can be protection by patent law (especially if it really is original and non-trivial). But how effective are they against well-heeled corporations - in practice? How effective are they against open source - in practice? (they are not 100% effective, but I'm not saying they are 0% effective - just asking how effective) Unique technology can also be protected by confidentiality, but usually it's not hard to reverse engineer, if competitors want to. Saas hides your tech better than software products (that competitors can access), but both can be reverse engineered. Secret tech does buy you time (how long?). You can keep ahead indefinitely if you can keep coming up with additional unique technology Assumptions: there are additional techniques to be found... and it is you who finds them. I think unique technology protects against free only to an extent. It can give you a head-start, during which you can establish other protection - which will also eventually crumble. Maybe the best thing is to make something that can't be made for free - like chewing gum, chocolates, soda, bricks, CPUs - and then use all these protections to fractionally improve your profits?