Originally Posted by foresthill

Seeing as Specialized and Trek spend big bucks researching their design, why would they be motivated to let some other company (or each other) benefit for free from all the work they just had to pay for? How is that supposed to work?

Software is a different beast, since lots of people spread out all over the world can (in theory) work on it together for each other's common benefit. None of them are really trying to sell the software once it's done, tho they may sell services based on it.

I don't see anyone making a business model out of giving away bikes in order to sell associated services, really.