Protecting Source Code

[Bo M. Maryniuck]

On Friday 09 May 2003 13:53, Alex Martelli wrote:
> Selling a product doesn't mean you must install all executable code
> on customer machines.

Hmm. I just thinking... Well, and yes and not: if you install on YOUR website 
something very important, you SHOULD be responsible to make it work all the 
time. And other side of the bad thing is that who want to pay a standalone 
product without a "heart"? I.e. I am a customer. And what will be with MY 
business, if you will simply DIE in the market as a company? :| Yes, you 
probably will questionally answer me "Who stupid will buy a product from a 
company, which WILL die?" ;-) But that's another story I think.

> I'm not sure what you're driving at.  If there are exploitable security
> holes, an untrustworthy bank employee can no doubt enrich himself or
> herself if he or she can find and exploit them.  

Probably more in theory... Yes, they do this for sure: several different 
companies tries to crack/find a bugs/ etc. But in practice (and Bible) human 
knowlegde != God knowledge. Samba for Linux -- is an example: everybody (who 
want to) had access to the code and might examine it. But as result: there 
was very big hole for 8 years and nobody found it before!

> You can reproduce everything (at a cost) without needing to examine source
> code for the purpose.  If all you have is an idea, and it's not patentable,
> and you can't get serious savings in terms of first-mover advantages,
> network effect, and the like, you won't survive in the market, sure.  That
> has precious little to do with "protecting source code", though.

Fully agree with you here. OTOH (I still just thinking, don't bite me! :-), as 
contrexample -- where IBM still selling very old product: IBM MQ Series. 
Product is pure crap, has Lisp-like scripting-language where you should type 
all in UPPERCASE, processes sometimes does not work at all, but this stuff is 
still on a market place. ;-)

--
Regards, Bogdan

How much net work could a network work, if a network could net work?