...if Eli Whitney [had] decided to keep the cotton gin to himself...
How on earth would that have been feasible? I mean, it would be somewhat realistic to imagine him not having the will to invent it in the first place. How on earth can one keep secret the design of a mechanical device that one sells to the public? Has any attempt to do so ever been successful?
Perhaps not so much a mechanical device, but take a closed source patented piece of software for example. You could be able to keep the design (source code) secret, and yet still sell it to the public.
By now we've seen this movie enough to know that if enough people care about the software, its DRM will be broken eventually. There is also a breakover point at which the more onerous the DRM is to paying users, the more users will choose not to pay and simply use the cracked version. This point will vary based on the nature of the software.
How on earth would that have been feasible? I mean, it would be somewhat realistic to imagine him not having the will to invent it in the first place. How on earth can one keep secret the design of a mechanical device that one sells to the public? Has any attempt to do so ever been successful?