Basically, if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.
Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.
Making things open-source brings the cost down.
Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.
Basically, if I have no intention of using a service then I won't bother reverse-engineering it.
If you want to build an open source project, you can't let your ego stand in the way. You can't rewrite everybody's patches, you can't second-guess everybody, and you have to give people equal control.
If you don't have the best product, you're not going to make it in open-source.
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.
In short, software is eating the world.
One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.