Re: request to ban 'no source' contributions
Christian Cuvier wrote:
> I see no reason whatsoever to allow or promote closed source. If a project is
> easy to clone, there's no relevance in selling it under any form, and that
> very act should be outlawed probably. If it's sophisticated enough, there
> won't be any serious cloning at all.
>
> Regulations on intellectual property equally apply to open or closed source,
> so that binding cannot take any commercial argument as an excuse. Things that
> are worthy of being sold don't get pirated, only overpriced software is. Or
> software with unduly harsh licensing terms.
I don't think that by posting closed source software on the Euphoria
website indicates a promotion of that software.
I do not like closed source software, mostly for all the same reasons
already posted, but as a professional for 20+ years I also must accept
that many programmers still today consider closed software a security
blanket much like Linus in Peanuts. Closed source software IS a legal
perogative. And I wouldn't totally discount the security afforded by
closed source software. Yes, the software can be cloned, but that's a
lot of work. The same as a lock is no security against a professional
thief, so closed source is no security against a dedicated hacker, but
does that then invalidate my decision to lock up? No, I lock up my
house to remove the temptation for the casual passerby to go through my
things and possibly steal. I may even have an alarm system to stop the
bungling thief, but I still do not trust my alarm system to stop all
thieves. And so, I as a programmer may want to protect my intelectual
property because I don't trust the law to be a strong enough deterent.
Do I expect my software to never be hacked/cloned or otherwise violated?
No, but I know that at least I have not made it easy.
My argument on protected sources has always been to allow programmers
what they want. If their measures to protect their sources goes beyond
the sensibilities of the market, then they will feel it in the pocket,
or in the fact that no-one uses their software. Just look at all the
crap software vendors have done through the years for copy protection.
How many softwares do you see today protected beyond the annoying
registration code that any 5 year old can write down and distribute?
Remember, I support open source, I release all my stuff as open source,
but that doesn't give me the right to denegrate those who choose to
hold onto their sources.
> Binding is a
> slap in the face of programmers at large, that's all. Another Eu misfeature...
I disagree. Not just because what I wrote above, but because binding
provides features that I want even though I distribute source. Granted,
I have only been messing with Euphoria for a couple of weeks and have not
yet purchased it to be able to bind it, but I will if I have something
worth distributing. Your assumptions are only based on distribution to
the programming community, and so your arguments may be true for the
Euphoria website, but to call binding an Eu misfeature is to miss the
world-at-large. If I bind my program, there is now only a handful of
files I have to distribute, so it is much easier to distribute. If I
bind my program, I know that someone can not accidentally open one of my
files in notepad and break the app and then come wining to me that the
app is broken. I may also choose to bind so that a part of the bound app
is not distributed as open source. This could be for a variety of reasons,
I may be protecting the intelectual rights of another programmer who
granted me permission to use his routines, but not the right to distro
his source. I may have put in a file in the bound app that is not available
in source so that I can tell if a bound app was bound by me, or by
someone with the source. Beleive it or not, that last saved me in
another programming environment where my customer decided to modify my
program, compile it and then get me to troubleshoot the problems they
created. They even went so far as to alter the date and time on the
compiled code to be the same as what I distro'd. It wasn't until I invoked
an "easter egg" function which proved that the distro was not mine that
the customer had to come clean that they had modified it and therefore I
would get paid to troubleshoot it because the customer no longer had a leg
to stand on that it was a bug in MY code.
Jim
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