[wazoox]

This is the typical argument favouring patents and more broadly, intellectual property. I'm personally against all form of patentw, and for some severe restriction of copyright and trademarking. You could have a look at the book "against intellectual property" (right wing view :), or "against intellectual monopoly" (different, less liberterian view) they're quite partial but have some compelling arguments.

http://mises.org/books/against.pdf

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

[onan_barbarian]

You're preaching to the choir. I'm not making that argument. I'm making the argument that always opening your source up removes a fairly thick line of defense against straightforward reverse engineering, and makes software patents seem more necessary.

There's always the prospect of reverse engineering, but it's a lot harder to do and there are situations where it seems rather unlikely. In enterprise software, particularly, it seems considerably less likely that a big company will perpetrate hard-core reverse engineering naughtiness when bound by a thicket of NDAs and contracts - why risk it? A quick browse through the opened source code is a rather different beast.