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I work with open source technology in my job all the time, and I don't think there's any danger of someone freely implementing the custom systems we need to support our clients' needs. Just because everyone knows how a wrench works doesn't mean my mechanic is fixing my car for free.

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Bits are trivially copyable; alternators not so much.

The point is that the arrangement of bits might not be appropriate to copy; people have been writing poetry for millennia but when you need to write copy of a webpage or lay out a spreadsheet you have to write out new 'bits', you can't just tear out a page of Hamlet and hope that it does the job.

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