En, I don’t know. So much innovation has happened because of parent workarounds. Also they can kind of stop big companies just completely copying some innovation and driving the inventor out of businesses It’s pretty apparent in the 3d printing industry. Companies like Prusa, E3d, Ultimaker, MakerBot and Aleph-Objects brought consumer 3d printing from basically a hot glue gun to better than some $100k+ industry machines. All of them used to be completely open sourced. Ok, MakerBot and to some degree Ultimaker just went off the deep end, but Prusa is now also holding back their design files for a while after release, E3d has released their new hotend as basically closed Source. Why? Well they want to avoid going the path of Aleph-Objects who had to sell out to a holding company because Chinese manufacturers copied everything as fast as it could be developed and sold it for a fraction of the price.

I’d love if it didn’t have to be this way, but it kind of does now.