Let's do a thought experiment in an area the HN crowd is more familiar with. Gitlab is open source. Heck even all their internal documents are open. Can you bec

Let's do a thought experiment in an area the HN crowd is more familiar with. Gitlab is open source. Heck even all their internal documents are open. Can you become an effective Gitlab competitor just by copying their stuff? Let's say Slack's source code got leaked. Can you become an effective Slack competitor just by copying them? Now imagine that the semiconductor industry is many times more complex. Also look at what the Chinese semiconductor industry is actually doing. Anybody who pays attention sees that they're trying out new things, choosing solution directions that are free from foreign IP. Chinese fabs are replacing foreign equipment with Chinese (incompatible) equipment. Why would they do all that instead of doubling down on hacking and stealing? Why would Chinese equipment not be drop-in-compatible if copying and stealing is so lucrative? Why would Huawei drop all Android support, instead opting to design their entire OS stack from the ground up in an incompatible manner, instead of leeching from open source Android forever?