Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:00:59 -0500, geremy condra quoted Banibrata Dutta
<banibrata.du...@gmail.com>:
BTW for people who are non-believers in something being worth stealing
needing protection, need to read about the Skype client.
Pardon me for breaking threading, but the original post has not come
through to my provider, only the reply from Geremy.
Many things are worth stealing and therefore need protection.
In any case, reverse engineering software is not theft. And even if it
were, keeping the source code secret is no barrier to a competent,
determined attacker or investigator. Skype is a good example: despite the
lack of source code and the secret protocol, analysts were able to
discover that TOM-Skype sends personally identifiable information,
encryption keys and private messages back to central servers.
In my personal opinion, releasing closed source software is prima facie
evidence that the software is or does something bad: leaking personal
information, infringing somebody else's copyright or patent, or just
being badly written. I'm not saying that every piece of closed source
software is like that, but when you hide the source, the burden of proof
is on you to prove that you're not hiding something unpleasant.
You are assuming that everyone who might be interested in copying your code is
able to reverse-engineer it. That might be true for software with a high
commercial value, but it is by no means true for all software. And in saying
"when you hide the source, the burden of proof is on you to prove that you're
not hiding something unpleasant" you are tacitly assuming that the users of the
software care about having such a thing proven. I submit that most users do not
have this "guilty until proven innocent" attitude.
To give a personal example: I plan soon to distribute (free) to anyone
interested some scientific software. For various reasons I do not intend to
distribute the source code at this stage. I'm quite confident that the users
(biologists) will have neither the desire nor the ability to reverse-engineer
it. Of course I'd be tremendously flattered if they did want to. I'm also
confident that they will not suspect me of "hiding something unpleasant". In
the worst case they might think the program is useless.
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