Copying a design is bad, but it can also be great. It is how the company handles the situation that matters and that is in their hands.
If they can play it right, they can become the number 1 low end analyzer in the world and capitalize on it.
Back in the early 80's, a small company called AutoDesk released a program called AutoCad. It was expensive - I remember it costing thousands at a time a Honda Accord cost under $10,000. Through a combination of very cheap aCADEMIC copies to colleges and having almost no software protection, they became the package that every young engineer was using. It was really hard getting and using software from the big names of the time. Pirated copies of AutoCad were everywhere. Now Autodesk are one of the software giants, dominating CAD and 3D Animation.
Also in the 80's, there were about 3 big names in the PC Word processing business. Wordperfect, Wordstar, and DeskMate. All were fairly well protected with license numbers and limited distribution of the install program. These were very expensive programs targeting the business market, so they were not very affordable for home use at all. Microsoft released a nice little program called "Word" with absolutely no protection. Because it was the easiest one to pirate, it became the most widely used word processor. Both Autodesk and Microsoft new exactly what was happening, and they could have added license protection very early, but they chose not to. In fact it was "Word 2" - still with no protection - that really made a household name for Microsoft Word.
So no-one wants to have designs stolen, but it is also exceedingly hard for tech companies to get people over the hurdle of learning their product for the first time so they can use it. If Saleae published more design information so that the clones were better quality, and kept a working non-protected version of their software freely available (even if unlicensed use was not permitted), then they may be able to vastly expand their market without the huge cost of increasing hardware production, hardware distribution, warranty claims, etc.
Many companies would still insist on owning legal copies, so they would still buy it, if it was useful.
Saleae may be able to offer protected "Deluxe" versions of their software and hardware, and so if you were using the vanilla one, you would wish you could one day have the better one, and there would be no learning curve.
So Saleae could go the way of adding some ugly Authentication to their software, add some kind of unique encrypted hardware ID to their hardware and basically annoy all their paying customers and still be competing against the clones using their current software version. Or they can use the situation to their advantage and maybe become the cheap logic analyzer that all of us have and use by default.
Up to them.
Richard