I don't think your reasoning applies to most software. I'm guessing most software these days runs on the server. Think of heroku. If they open sourced their ful

I don't think your reasoning applies to most software. I'm guessing most software these days runs on the server. Think of heroku. If they open sourced their full stack they still wouldn't have to worry too much about copycats. It still takes a lot of expertise and work to run something like heroku, and they are always making progress which the copycat would have a hard time keeping up with.