Great points Sam.
In another thread I also spoke about the motivations of creating an open source company.
"Another benefit I have found of having copycats copycats of Open Source projects, is that even when they had the means to produce at the same speed and at a lower price.
Normally lower price also means lower quality.
This allows more people to afford the copycats copy, which leads to creating a bigger awareness, market and ecosystem to a new innovation. Once the cheaper products fails or breaks, consumers usually go to the player who has the best reputation (meaning the original creator).
Some examples of this are Arduino, OpenRov, OpenDesk, Sparkfun, OSVehicle, Tesla…"
Besides this, if you want to remain the referent open source company, besides having a superior innovation and a community of contributors, you also have to deliver a quality product and a good service.
If you miss any of these three ingredients, any other project can take over and effectively “rip off” your project.
PS: I think this post would be great as a full fledged blog post!