According to http://oosmos.com/feedback:

> The core IP of OOSMOS, oosmos.h and oosmos.c, are currently shipped as obfuscated compilable source files. We'd love to speak with open source investors to figure out a business model that allows these files to be open source in order to accelerate the adoption of this novel technology.

I don't think obfuscating code really protects it, but that seems to be the reason.

Interesting. Since you could just run the C preprocessor on it (with, e.g. gcc -E) to expand all the macros, that seems like an unusually poor method of obfuscation.

In fact, if this falls under trade secret, then whoever figures it out is free to own it. Not even sure copyright would protect the original if all they are publishing is obfuscated code. If they wanted to get serious about IP, software patents are probably the only option. Otherwise they shouldn't be releasing the code in any form IMHO.

Not only that but it's actually harder to claim violation of IP/Copyright since once the code is de-obfuscated/reverse engineered it will not resemble the shipped product and any resemblance to the original factory code can be claimed as purely coincidental since by obfuscating the code they denied anyone access to the original.