i think the toughest thing to understand is that it literally doesn't matter if your software is open source, closed source anymore - if it's closed source, people can and will RE: its internals, if it's a part of a broader suite, ppl will make it a plugin in their suite, if it's a model that people can blackbox fuzz and the model isnt huge and didn't have incredibly proprietary data, you are going to get copied on the tech
so every core product launch probably needs to be treated as an extreme countdown race, before the incumbent with the distribution eats you
brutal times to be playing, and extremely valuable/rare to find a corner of the stack that may be defensible and will stay defensible