But in the hardware game there is a lot of counterfeiting. There is rarely any shame or consequence when it comes to outright IP theft. Making it easier to access the firmware makes it easier for someone to counterfeit your widget.
You think the public facing representatives (management etc.) are morons, because
you think their strategy for working in the same space sucks unless
you think your company is totally blowing it and you are on your way out
but you don't think their programmers are morons so much (except when you examine site and it performs worse than yours for obvious reasons that you fixed on yours) but
if they roll out a really cool feature you can implement in your product you will write code to implement that feature and not wish you had their code because anyway your stuff is incompatible codebases unless
you get bought by them or they get bought by you or you both merge because you are in fact compatible and this way something beautiful will emerge
yeah right.
This certainly caused FTDI a lot of trouble.
> when a product goes out of production.
By the time this happens, the company has lost their throwaway source code.
Would be cool if manufacturers would make old versions of sourcecode public after a couple of years, and the final version when a product goes out of production.