[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.