>Reverse engineering for commercial gain lowers the amount of risk that a
>company will take in the development of new technology. This in turn will
>slow the discovery of new technology and techniques.

However, the company doing the reverse engineering will be introducing
their clone much later than the original company, and will therefore only
be able to compete based on cost (which will of course be much lower since
they won't have as much of the engineering overhead).  This will benefit
consumers by giving them a choice of source as well as a less-expensive
product (if you can wait 1-2 years for it to come out).

In the meantime, the original company will be working away on the next
generation, and will (hopefully) have recouped their engineering investment
on the earlier product, so the introduction of a clone will not be totally
deleterious.

In an effort to compete against the low-price clone, the original company
will be forced to enhance the feature set.  That is good for the consumers,
too, but it also ENHANCES the discovery of new technology and techniques.

This is probably the reason that, as fast as the thrid-world Far East
countries are moving forward, that the West is still so far ahead, and
likely to remain so.

Andy

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Andy Kunz - Statistical Research, Inc. - Westfield, New Jersey USA
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