Originally Posted by
Yoshi
He's saying that SRAM, BBB< Tiso, IRD and Suntour probably do have equipment to reverse-engineer the cassette. His comment about tolerances was that it wasn't as important for a cassette. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
More likely Shimano licenses their specs to other manufacturers while Campy does not. I'm pretty sure the splined interfaces would be patented so reverse-engineering them would be illegal.
Well, this is exactly what I was saying all along - the reverse-engineering angle was just to show that there is no way manufacturers couldn't get the tolerances right, and it was, as I said, ludicrious that anyone would have to or want to reverse-engineer.
It's interesting to see how you went full-circle from criticizing my point of view, to actually agreeing that the Shimano cassette interface is a de-facto standard (and campi isn't). No, I don't expect you'd ever admit to this hahah, it doesn't matter.