extreme newbie

[cpunerd4]

even so,
crackers have a harder time getting into compiled programs rather than
intepreted languages. I know hiding the code won't stop all crackers
but it will stop some of the casual theifs won't it? It's not so much
that they could steal code, it's that they could alter it and release
it somewere else and make their own money off it.
cpunerd4

 

[cpunerd4]

by the way, you guys have talked me out of java. Im thinking about this
py2exe thing. (anyother suggestions)
I like this list.

 

[Peter Hansen]

even so,
crackers have a harder time getting into compiled programs rather than
intepreted languages. I know hiding the code won't stop all crackers
but it will stop some of the casual theifs won't it? It's not so much
that they could steal code, it's that they could alter it and release
it somewere else and make their own money off it.

Roughly speaking, if your code is so valuable, there's very little you
can do to stop if from being used in this way, except for keeping it
inside a secured "network appliance" which prevents all access (though
even then the box itself can be stolen, so you have to allow access only
through the internet in that case).

Furthermore, protecting you from someone else making money off a copy of
your program is basically what licenses are for, and if you have noticed
they don't protect even Microsoft (see, for example, entire governments
like the Indonesian government, which has mass-pirated Microsoft
software for a long time).

On the other hand, while a license isn't a guarantee of much, it does
make it easier to go after violators in a court and sue them for
damages. And if you think your software is really worth the efforts you
are envisioning to protect it, you should be prepared to go after people
in court when they violate your license, not trying to prevent them from
copying it in the first place (which is basically impossible, except see
my first point again ;-).

My main suggestion to you is this. Many people with several decades
more experience than you used to feel exactly as you do (I did!), and
have now, after years of developing and selling commercial software,
changed their view of the whole issue drastically. Learn from others'
mistakes and don't waste your time worrying about this "stealing code"
thing... put your efforts into developing really useful, valuable
software, and the world will beat a path to your door to give you money
(see Google, for example), and while a few people might be trying to
profit from your efforts without your permission, you'll either be in a
good position to ignore them or sue them, as you will....

-Peter

 

[cpunerd4]

I see your point, although I don't think there is much a 14 year old
can do to sue someone. . . I'm sure my code won't be that valuable
untill I'm older though. Thanks

 

[Peter Hansen]

I see your point, although I don't think there is much a 14 year old
can do to sue someone. . . I'm sure my code won't be that valuable
untill I'm older though. Thanks

You're probably wrong on the first count, and whether you're wrong on
the second is entirely up to you. ;-)

(I recall hearing of at least one programmer who made his first million
around the age of 14 after having written some brilliant game back in
the days of Apple IIs and C-64s. These days I'd be surprised if 14 was
still the lower limit for millionaire status amongst young programmers.)

-Peter

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Furthermore, protecting you from someone else making money off a copy of
your program is basically what licenses are for, and if you have noticed
they don't protect even Microsoft (see, for example, entire governments
like the Indonesian government, which has mass-pirated Microsoft
software for a long time).

Please call it what it is: copyright infringement, not piracy. Piracy
takes place in international waters, and involves one or more of theft,
murder, rape and kidnapping. Making an unauthorized copy of a piece of
software is not piracy, it is an infringement of a government-granted
monopoly.

In any case, there is a powerful argument for wanna-be Microsofts to
turn a blind eye to copyright infringements. It worked for Microsoft and
almost every other successful software company.

The biggest barrier to success for software developers is getting people
to even know your software exists. The second biggest barrier is
encouraging them to try your software. The third is getting them to keep
using your software once they've tried it. Actually collecting money from
them is at the bottom of the list -- you can't expect people to pay you
for using your software if they don't even know you exist.

Apart from the occasional public rant (such as Bill Gates' plea to users
not to make illegal copies of MS BASIC), in the early days Microsoft
didn't go out of their way to chase copyright infringers. If they had, the
users would have simply stopped using the MS software and used something
else. Instead, people grabbed copies of Word or Excel from their friends,
taking market share from WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus etc. Eventually,
they would need an upgrade, or find it more convenient to buy than to
copy. Every so-called "pirated copy" had (at least) four benefits to
Microsoft: it denied a sale to Microsoft's competitors; it increased
users' familiarity and confidence with Microsoft's products; it built
Microsoft's brand recognition among software purchasers and IT
departments; and it was (usually) a future sale to Microsoft.

It was only as Microsoft approached monopoly status that copyright
infringement began to hurt them more than it gained them. With few if any
competitors, the loss of revenue from unauthorized copies of Word or Excel
or Windows became greater than the benefits.

 

[cpunerd4]

the problem is that i don't even know the language yet. . .

 

[Mrsani]

So true. Am I the only one who wonders this: If Python at runtime runs

very much like Java and has generally about the same
speed (or faster)

rofl

 

[Chinook]

Please call it what it is: copyright infringement, not piracy. Piracy
takes place in international waters, and involves one or more of theft,
murder, rape and kidnapping. Making an unauthorized copy of a piece of
software is not piracy, it is an infringement of a government-granted
monopoly.

In any case, there is a powerful argument for wanna-be Microsofts to
turn a blind eye to copyright infringements. It worked for Microsoft and
almost every other successful software company.

The biggest barrier to success for software developers is getting people
to even know your software exists. The second biggest barrier is
encouraging them to try your software. The third is getting them to keep
using your software once they've tried it. Actually collecting money from
them is at the bottom of the list -- you can't expect people to pay you
for using your software if they don't even know you exist.

Apart from the occasional public rant (such as Bill Gates' plea to users
not to make illegal copies of MS BASIC), in the early days Microsoft
didn't go out of their way to chase copyright infringers. If they had, the
users would have simply stopped using the MS software and used something
else. Instead, people grabbed copies of Word or Excel from their friends,
taking market share from WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus etc. Eventually,
they would need an upgrade, or find it more convenient to buy than to
copy. Every so-called "pirated copy" had (at least) four benefits to
Microsoft: it denied a sale to Microsoft's competitors; it increased
users' familiarity and confidence with Microsoft's products; it built
Microsoft's brand recognition among software purchasers and IT
departments; and it was (usually) a future sale to Microsoft.

It was only as Microsoft approached monopoly status that copyright
infringement began to hurt them more than it gained them. With few if any
competitors, the loss of revenue from unauthorized copies of Word or Excel
or Windows became greater than the benefits.

Steven,

Your weigh-in on semantics is misleading, but your elaboration of the aspect
is very well put.

As to semantics, piracy is to the originator what freedom fighter is to those
that perceive themselves as oppressed.

On the other hand, your elaboration is a very good example of the altered
consciousness of human nature. That is, the acceptance of shades of
complicity divorced from shades of guilt. Of course, one can see (if they so
chose) many more obvious examples in business, let alone government and
religion :~)

Lee C

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

even so,
crackers have a harder time getting into compiled programs rather than
intepreted languages. I know hiding the code won't stop all crackers

A good debugger in step mode can get into anything... At my
college, those of us with the skills took less than 30 minutes to unlock
the system assembler after it had been set to run on higher privileged
accounts (the OS had numeric "priority" levels in accounts; students ran
at 20 or 40, the assembler had been set to something like 50 to stop the
troublemakers). Copy the executable to local, start under debugger,
step through until the test for account priority was reached, change
comparison... Voila, private copy of the assembler.

--

 

[Ed Jensen]

It's just like Java. It's compiled into bytecode and then the
bytecode is executed on a virtual machine.

Keep in mind that all modern JVMs "just-in-time" compile Java bytecode
to native code. It looks something like this:

Java source -> Java bytecode -> Java virtual machine -> Native code

So, in the end, users are typically running natively compiled code.

(Warning: This is a simplification, but this description seems
adequate for the OP.)

Java typically outperforms Python by a very wide margin.

 

[Ed Jensen]

The only system (apart from solaris, I guess) that has a JVM by default
is OSX, and it's _NOT_ sun's one, but the internally developed one.

Apple licenses Sun's JVM and makes the modifications necessary to run
it on OSX. I know I'm being a pedant, but I don't want people to
think Apple writes their own JVM from scratch. Also, Java is
installed on lots of systems by companies like Dell and HP; however,
you usually can't predict which version of the JVM is installed or how
the Java auto update features are configured.

That being said, I think Sun is being foolish by not ensuring Java is
free enough to be included with every Linux distribution. Talk about
letting a golden opportunity slip through their fingers...

As others have pointed out, Python's non-restrictive licensing allows
it to be installed far and wide, and it's easy to bundle a Python
interpreter with your application, which is great. These are big
advantages for Python.

 

[John Machin]

A good debugger in step mode can get into anything... At my
college, those of us with the skills took less than 30 minutes to unlock
the system assembler after it had been set to run on higher privileged
accounts (the OS had numeric "priority" levels in accounts; students ran
at 20 or 40, the assembler had been set to something like 50 to stop the
troublemakers). Copy the executable to local, start under debugger,
step through until the test for account priority was reached, change
comparison... Voila, private copy of the assembler.

This unnamed OS didn't allow granting execute access but not read access?

I do agree with your main point however. Once you have read access to
the software, you can do pretty much what you like.

<war story>
I recall a piece of software that was paid for on an annual licence fee
basis, and would stop working after a given date. The update sometimes
arrived late. Fortunately it was a trivial exercise to find the date
check in the "expired" executable and circumvent it. Debug in step mode?
How quaint and tedious! All one had to do was to put a Trojan
DLL-equivalent in the path; this contained a today()-equivalent function
that simply called the system debug function. Of course the authors
could have prevented that by dynamically loading the today()-equivalent
function directly from the manufacturer-supplied system-central
DLL-equivalent; my guess is that doing so would have prevented easy
testing of the "stop working" code on a shared machine where they
couldn't change the system date without upsetting other users, and it's
probable they were using a Trojan today()-equivalent gadget to supply
"old" dates for testing.
</war story>

Cheers,
John

 

[Harlin Seritt]

?

 

[Kent Johnson]

Am I the only one who wonders this: If Python at runtime runs
very much like Java and has generally about the same speed (or faster),
then why in the world isn't Java becoming more archaic and being
steadily replaced by Python? I ask this not as a rhetorical question,
but --really-- how come developers are still stuck on Java when Python
seems to be a far better language? In context, Python is not a low
level compiled language like C/C++ is but an interpreted one just like
Java.

Sigh. You're not the only one who wonders this. I have been trying to get my co-workers (in a mostly Java shop) interested in Python & Jython for 2-3 years with no success. What I see is that
- most of them have little or no time to learn anything new that is not directly required to get their job done.
- most of them have zero interest in evaluating new tools and trying to pick the best; they just use what is popular.

"I don't have time to sharpen my saw, I'm too busy cutting down this tree!"

Sigh.
Kent

 

[Brian]

Hi Cpunerd4,

For beginners, I would strongly recommend checking out
http://www.GreenTeaPress.com -- they publish a FREE, online book that is
used in Highschools and other educational facilities to teach Python
programming. Excellent -- a must have for those who wish to learn about
the language.

Brian

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

Steven,

Your weigh-in on semantics is misleading,

How is it misleading?

but your elaboration of the aspect is very well put.

As to semantics, piracy is to the originator what freedom fighter is to those
that perceive themselves as oppressed.

Very little modern piracy is politically motivated, unlike the glory days
when terrorist nations like Great Britain and Spain supported "privateers"
to attach each other's ships and raid other nations. These days modern
pirates are generally petty criminals in small boats with crews of less
than a dozen people.

http://www.oceannavigator.com/article.php?a=5418
http://www.noonsite.com/Members/webmaster/R2002-06-10-2
http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php

On the other hand, your elaboration is a very good example of the altered
consciousness of human nature. That is, the acceptance of shades of
complicity divorced from shades of guilt. Of course, one can see (if they so
chose) many more obvious examples in business, let alone government and
religion :~)

I don't understand your point.

But for the record, I never excused copyright infringement. I simply
pointed out that for organisations who are not monopolies in their
business niche, they gain more benefit from turning a blind eye to most
copyright infringement than they lose.

Or, to put it another way, those developers who face competition in their
market niche and put up barriers to casual copying (eg anti-copying
technology, dongles, serial numbers, licence enforcement, etc) almost
always lose out against competitors who turn a blind eye to that copying.

Copyright infringement may be illegal. It may even be immoral. But for
developers who face competition, ignoring it may be the best strategy.

That's not an issue of human consciousness, altered or not. It is an
economic issue.

 

[Dave Cook]

thanks all for the advice. The reason I was thinking about using java
(or C or something) was that it is a little more secure than
distributing the source code isn't it?

<sigh> 14 and he already wants to horde his source code.

Dave Cook

 

[Dave Cook]

I see your point, although I don't think there is much a 14 year old
can do to sue someone. . . I'm sure my code won't be that valuable
untill I'm older though. Thanks

It's valuable as something to show prospective employers or clients: "I wrote
and maintained blahblah.sourceforge.net and foobar.sourceforge.net."

Dave Cook

 

[Peter Hansen]

<sigh> 14 and he already wants to horde his source code.

Be gentle. Most of us have been there (those fortunate enough to have
been in a position to write source code at 14), and it felt like a
sensible viewpoint at the time. I suspect that the attitude will be
less and less common in the future, as the open source movement
continues to prove successful.

-Peter