I am an Engineer also, with also historical patents. At the time I created patents, I would have agreed with you completely, secrecy was something necessary, as far as we were conditioned, by the for-profit system.

Now having worked voluntarily at own expense on the energy problem affecting our planet, for the past six years, It is clear to me we were wrong. The for profit system is to blame for an awful lot more bad than good, unfortunately.

Keeping secrets, 99.99% of time, is about seeking profit. We all do it because we all have to, but that doesn't make it right. The truth is that the requirement for all to seek profit is the very thing that keeps us tied into energy by extraction, which is physically unsustainable.

We can't say this is right, not by any stretch of the imagination.

When we realise this, then we start to see all the bad in the profit driven system, and actually there seems no end to it, a world in which everyone jumps to possess and claim ownership of anything that can be possessed or claimed, and held for ransom, denied to anyone and everyone who can't or won't pay. A world in which progress of anyone other than ourselves is grudged to the point we deliberately sabotage the efforts of others, sanctioning, bombing, even killing. This was never right, we were conditioned to think it was right, but it never was.

If we create something, a work of art, an invention, an Engineering design, it doesn't actually belong to us, it belongs jointly to all our ancestors everyone who contibuted to making us what we are, and everyone who ever taught us anything, even our planet, which sacrificed the energy we've used in our lives until now.

With this mindset, that we project onto all others, of course we feel suspicious, beleiving they would do to us, what we know we would do to them, actually when we think about it, this is such a limiting mindset, we are no better than neanderthals with this stupid possessive mindset.

Hey-ho, I don't expect any of this will change your opinion, but hopefully it lets you know what others who don't feel so possessive about their data might feel like.