Would be interesting to be more specific - LightSail actually sounds like the kind of situation people are more likely support patents in: non-obvious research work leading to large improvements over existing methods; presumably it woudld be considerably easier to reverse engineer if you had to the physical device. And I imagine company could productively use huge investment to have huge impact but investment might be hard without reassurance of IP.

So you say you have secrets - are there patents on the mechanism itself? Did investors request/care about those patents?

Maybe is different in this case cos I wouldn't be surprised if author actually was happy for this technology to be successful even if some other company made more money out of it.

Also for anyone who hasn't, read around rest of the website also!