John Tapsell tapselj0@cs.man.ac.uk wrote:
Have the VCs explicitly said that?
They said that in business you need to find a way to protect your goods by 'black box'ing it.
You only need to do that if you are not the best at what you do.
But after that it would be fine. But then who knows where we'll be in 3 years...
If your product is worthwhile, you will be obsolete by then. Either a Free Software replacement will be developed, forcing you into doing what you should have done originally, or a larger competitor's closed product will kill yours so you might as well open and do what you should have done originally. Either way, your loss of reputation is massive and possibly catastrophic
Of course, that is assuming that you're not planning to use some other dubious tactic such as process patents to prolong the agony.