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Why would the company relying on scarcity of knowledge they deem "trade secrets" to gather revenue instead of directly being productive? Expecting unbounded ongoing revenue from a constant amount of work they did once to describe the "trade secrets" into code is extractive and doesn't incentivize future productivity.

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Any product that requires many years of R&D has to rely on trade secrets or on software patents, since otherwise the company could not possibly compete with copycats who reverse engineer their know how and therefore have zero R&D costs. There is often no other way, not every market is based on constant fake innovation and feature creep.

It’s still a valid strategy and it makes sense in the current economic system.

It's not really tenable because it just takes someone without a profit motive to reimplement it or something that can substitute for it and the business model breaks. There's countless examples of this.

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