I believe the point GP was making was that the "algorithm" is not the important part, and is actually reasonably easy to reverse engineer if it's not just copie

I believe the point GP was making was that the "algorithm" is not the important part, and is actually reasonably easy to reverse engineer if it's not just copied wholesale from an existing algorithm. The important part is the weights used in the algorithm. Since the weights are input, and usually semi-unique to the user, they would be considered private information. For example, I could tell you that the "sorting algorithm" I use to foo my bars is ksort[0]. But that's not really meaningful information without also knowing what the keys are. [0]: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ksort.php https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ksort.php