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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> You have no ability to learn from Google even though you use their search engine - you can't reverse engineer it or improve it. Does this upset you?

I do, in so far as it interacts with my machine. I can look at the APIs, at the traffic patterns, at whatever code is shipped to my browser. But yeah, the secret sauce stays on their servers.

But then again, comparing Google to VW is apples-to-oranges too. Google is a software company, VW is a car manufacturer that incidentally has to write code for their engines. They are not competing with each other, they are not playing on the same field. So VW having no way to use SAAS for ECUs (thank God) is as much unfair to them as their DMCA restrictions are unfair to me (the user).

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Well actually they compete for the same workforce

So if you run a SAAS company you have the ability to create a giant monopoly make billions and buy up all the talent, and if you run a device/native-code-based company you should be relegated to fighting on the margins making returns in the window between your code-release and your competitors' reverse-engineering?

I'm not even sure what to say other than.. don't you think that's .. silly?

I think you can see the effect of this on VCs, where most funded startups are SAAS-ish, and you'll never get funding to make a product that's native.

This distorts the whole industry

A simple example is face identification. Facebook has some secrete sauce for doing an amazing job. You upload a photo and it almost always knows which one of your friends it is. I'd love to have a native app that does that for all the photos on my phone. Am I ever going to see it? No, b/c anyone who is half way decent at that stuff will go work for a SAAS company and make a lot of money by keeping his/her innovations as "secret sauce"

If you want an apples-to-apples comparison, why not look at the actual physical devices that Google is selling? To the extent that Google and VW are "competing for the same workforce", the folks writing code for the Nest, OnHub, or heck even Android are the ones you want to be thinking about anyway...

...And more importantly, the implications for the folks buying and installing these products are a hell of a lot closer to those pertaining to VW's ECUs.

If you're gonna argue for a level playing field, it probably helps to start with teams that are playing the same game, or at least one that's reasonably similar. Right now, you're arguing that Google's bobsled team would unfairly compete with VW's baseball players, ignoring that Google fields a cricket team as well...

> ...you should be relegated to fighting on the margins making returns in the window between your code-release and your competitors' reverse-engineering?

One's ability to profit from reverse-engineering a competitor's hard/soft/firmware is not unlimited. IIRC, if the purpose of the product of the RE isn't to be compatible [0] with the RE'd 'ware, then you absolutely have to do a dirty room RE and documentation followed by a completely independent clean-room reimplementation. This raises the cost of the endeavour by at least 2x.

See, the original holder of the copyright on that 'ware still potentially has a real claim on the product of a solely dirty-room reverse engineering endeavour.

Additionally, AIUI, many software licensing agreements make the situation a little more difficult and uncertain for our would-be reverse engineers.

And, if the thing you're RE'ing makes use of patented material, I suspect that things get rather expensive rather fast.

[0] That is, to work alongside or enhance the 'ware.

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