>>43Manufacturers have no incentive to expose internals, because releasing source code would make competitor's work easier. For example, leaked Windows 2000 source code greatly boosted Wine's development.
That's true. I didn't say patent risk was the
only reason, just that it was an important one.
Also, I'm not sure how much it would
really help the competitors; I don't think I know enough about CPU design. However, if it does eventually help competitors, that's a good thing for users since we'll get better CPUs faster.
Another thought; the innovation-rewarding benefits of secrecy wouldn't be entirely lost: they could also only publish the sources at the very last minute as the IC is about to hit the shelves. It would take the competitors a fair amount of time to clean room reverse engineer any technological advances (and then to integrate them into their own designs, test, etc.), so in the meantime the innovating company would get lots of sales for having some clever unique feature; innovation is rewarded.
>>44I somewhat agree with you. The point of any economic system in a democratic society is to serve the people (in practice this works out as
making the people feel served); in this case, the interests of the companies (i.e. to make money faster by stifling competition) are getting in the way of the interests of the people (i.e. safer computing). Sure, in an idealized capitalist system every actor has perfect information of what's best for them and literally everyone would avoid hardware they can't trust, but that's hardly a realistic assumption.
>>45That was VIP quality!