On Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:36:29 +0100, Nigel G Romeril said:
> Licensing and restriction are tied together, If I write a Perl program and
> license it to a client and he cannot easily copy or pass it on to a third
> party then I can continue to profit from my work. If the source is available
> he can pass it on to any third party who does not have to pay a licence fee
> to me. Restriction allows me to control this and hopefully continue to
> program. The question is how difficult I have to make this to stop most
> illicit use of my work. There has to be a middle way between all source
> being secret and some confidentiality. If someone is going to use my work to
> make money then I should have a right to secure some of this.
Let me summarize my previous post please: There is NO technical way of
protecting your program. It's only false sense of security that you get when
you compile your perl program. All programs, whether compiled or not, require
a finite computational effort to reverse to source form. There is NO software
or hardware method that can guarantee that no one can modify your program. The
only thing you can do is say "I'll sue you if you do such and such".
If I may add that the level of interest in the program and its tag price are
the two significant factors in deciding how long it will be before a program is
cracked. Games (very popular products) take a matter of days before it makes
it from the states, to some cracker in china, to the CD factory, to Kuwait
where we get it bundled for $5/CD regardless of the
language/platform/compiled/source/dongles/bla of the original programs.
If there was a way to stop piracy, Microsoft would've used it instead of
investing millions or billions into anti-piracy acts.
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