Duncan Sands wrote:
Couldn't you pass proprietary code through an obfuscator?
There is no way that large aerospace contractors would accept this, and we are given the code under strict non-disclosure agreements. An obfuscated version is still derived from this confidential source and would constitute disclosure. Even when such customers submit little tests, we rewrite them ab initio rather than pass them on. We are VERY careful about guarding our customers code in this regard for obvious reasons. It has been very valuable that large companies have been willing to entrust huge chunks of highly proprietary code to us for internal testing purposes, but it is strictly under the understanding that we guard it carefully. It's odd, we end up with the curious situation where all OUR code is GPL licensed Free Software, but our systems have to be maximally locked down, technically and with NDA restrictions, to protect this confidential customer code, which is critical to our testing infrastructure. Furthermore, I am not really sure that the FSF testing infrastructure is setup to deal with tests of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But Duncan, you were generating a bunch of proprietary Ada code recently, if you can get people to be comfortable submitting it, possibly in obfuscated form, by all means go ahead!
Duncan.
