"Tony Vandiver" wrote: > They can have the hardware design if they want to take the time to > reproduce it by figuring out what parts are supposed to be on it. The > real thing that keeps me protected (there's really no such thing as > protection in this business) is the software and the limited market for > what I design. In other words, a deterrent. Most things can be cracked, but at some point the cost of defeating protection becomes greater than the cost of developing the item from scratch. I read a whitepaper[1] recently on AES encoding, and it had a table in it, listing the resources available to hackers of various sizes: "Hacker"< $400 Small organization $10K Medium organization $300K Large organization $10M Intelligence agency $300M I guess the moral of the story is, a project that is worth $100K isn't worth spending $10M on, to crack it. > I've been getting pcbs from China for 6 years and > haven't seen a competing reproduction of any design yet because there's > not big volume in what I do. The Chinese aren't really any worse than > anyone else when it comes to "stealing" designs. Americans do it to > some extent all the time, we just can't always do it in a way that's > less expensive than what we're paying for it in the first place. If you > don't think that's true, walk into any company that does development for > a consumer product and count how many of their competitors designs they > have laying around for reference. Not us! We keep our competitors' designs neatly organized in a file drawer. > Besides, if you designed something > cool enough to be cloned in the first place, you should be patting > yourself on the back for being first to market and getting what you > could when you could - then move on to the next idea. Amen. Vitaliy [1] <> -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist