One of the most secure options, I think, is to provide a
web-based tool to do the computations. I know one case where this was
done. The clients probably did not even know that R was being used to
do the computations. They had an application or a procedure for
uploading their data to a secure web site, which then returned answers.
This too can be defeated by determined hackers, but if you are careful
about your encryption, etc., you can make it quite difficult for them.
Hope this helps.
Spencer
On 10/11/2011 10:41 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Oct 11, 2011, at 1:09 PM, A Zege wrote:
OK, gentlemen, i agree with you in general. I was not talking about a general
purpose, general use package that one prepares for CRAN. I am sure you are
familiar professionally or can imagine situations where you need to
demonstrate a solution to a specific task without fully disclosing the
details -- sometimes even hard core open source adherents need to sacrifice
desire for openness for some prosaic purposes, like getting paid :).
Those are fairly disjoint concepts - open source doesn't mean you can't get
paid. Also the fact that the source is accessible doesn't mean that it is legal
for someone else to take it - you define what you allow in the license. Note,
for example that Java bytecode can be easily disassembled into readable Java
source form and yet there is a lot of commercial software written in Java.
Compilable languages give an easy solution of a binary code. It sounds like
if one wants true binary, he has to recode in C++. I thought it's possible
in R as well, i thought this was discussed even as a default behavior for
next version of R to make stuff go faster. Maybe not. Thanks, anyway.
You can compile the functions and strip the source code from the bytecode
objects. Such a thing can be serialized without revealing the original source
code. However, you can still de-compile it, and R doesn't guarantee that such
stripped objects will continue to work, so your mileage will vary and you may
want to check if it's what you want.
There are obvious other ways you could use that are much simpler - such as
encrypt your sources. Nothing is completely bullet-proof, it's just a matter of
how much work it requires to break whichever method you choose.
Cheers,
Simon
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