You're on an YC forum, so here people will happily tell you about benefits of having somebody taking your product in this case. You can take their improvements

You're on an YC forum, so here people will happily tell you about benefits of having somebody taking your product in this case. You can take their improvements and use them in your product too. Here's the case of license abiding, and the whole topic is about it, but in a "good enough case" you may hope for that. That somebody else will expand the product awareness for your product. They'll try to go forward and find a good way, or get some burns trying something market doesn't approve, and many of that you can use for yourself. You may have a profitable strategy by selling to them, by selling your expertise elsewhere, by finding a niche etc. - or even, having enough resources, by going more aggressively to them. This forum traditionally thinks ideas are dime a dozen, and (lots and lots of) IP protections in hardware are weird, looking from the software point of view.