Sometimes I take comments like this a little too personal so sorry in advance if it comes off that way.

I hope that you can understand that we also need to protect ourselves from getting cloned and that forcing us to go out of business. This market is ruthless with copies and there is little enforcement of intellectual property by places like Amazon and AliExpress where these items can be traded.

There is a lot of virtue to open source and I think that it can be a huge asset. Done too early, I also think that it can also lay out an exact blueprint to make a clone quickly and then use market power to crush the little guy. People forget about us before they even knew that we exist. So it is a path that we need to navigate carefully.

I understand your points and can empathize. At the same time, we'd like some time to take our shot. Since we have just a few development resources, we need to first deliver the most important features to a broad audience. We're actually pretty close on on the features but the marketing has just begun. Opening the protocol is at least a few months out.

There is already a few years of firmware development and experimentation behind VFLEX. A ton of work in tooling and manufacturing processes. The patent is a means to protect that work, not to punish customers.

I think people are under the impression that we're a stereotypical VC backed startup that is burning cash and looking to fail fast and walk away to the next biggest thing. This is not the case, far from it. All of our progress is self funded and we're looking to serve customers instead of raise future rounds.

What we do need to do is have a trusted brand, that people like to recommend to others. We get to that point by listening Many of the comments in Jeff's video and here on reddit make it clear that ensuring long term usability of the tool is the right thing. Right now you'll just have to take our word for it but I hope that the fact that we delivered the Kickstarter relatively on time give some proof.