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Couldn't a cloud service just get a team to do some clean room reverse engineering to make a similar or even compatible tool without violating copyright?

IIRC software licenses are copyright licenses (you can't use the code / make derivatives based on the code) not patents (you can't make a product based on this _idea_).



Sure they could, but projects at big companies move so slowly, it would take them months just to staff the team, get a manager, a designer, and project-manager, and engineers assigned :) . Not really trying to restrict it, I want people to use it (even for free)! I just also want to be able to launch my startup


If "projects at big companies move so slowly", why are you afraid of being "cloud-poached" then?


Well, they move faster if they take your source code :)




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