From: Phil <cmdjackryan@...>
Date: 2007-09-02T02:24:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Seeing the source

> Intellectual property theft is a social problem, not a technical one.

Agreed.

> Social problems should have social solutions, and not technical solutions.
I
> agree with a former poster: I believe your answer consists of contracts,
> licenses and lawyers. It's quite usually immensely cost and time intensive
to
> build a technical solution that makes intellectual property theft
unattractive
> for a large percentage of your target audience, there are very, very few
> cases where it has arguably been made entirely unfeasible - and that took
a
> whole lot of engineering.

Disagree. There is, obviously, a *market* for code obfuscation with
*affordable* tools. The challenges are higher for a highly dynamic Language
like Ruby, but less so for languages like Java or C#, which have the
additional benefit of creating bytecode/IL, which can be obfuscated easier.

Code obfuscation is one step of many to "keep honest people honest".
Fighting a war with crackers will not end well, since there are more
crackers out there than people writing an application.

And in regard to social solutions, so far the DMCA hasn't stopped copyright
infringement nor IP "theft".

Besides, agreements can only help as long as both parties see themselves
bound by them. And if an agreement is sloppily worded, or seen through a
rose-colored lens (SCOX, anybody?), you end up with the same problem you had
in the beginning...

--
Phillip Gawlowski