[krastanov]

Are trade secrets really worse? My (uninformed, anecdotal, unsubstantiated) intuition is that reverse engineering, or even just the knowledge that something is possible, ensures that trade secrets are no barrier to progress. While patents definitely seem like a barrier.

[tintor]

If company is providing a service instead of selling products then reverse engineering is much much harder or not possible at all.

Example: Are you going to reverse self-driving code from a vehicle giving you are ride? Or a server behind an API?

[krastanov]

No, but knowing a solution exists makes finding the solution orders of magnitude easier.