hide python code !

[danielx]

Maybe so. And if a competitor creates a better product than yours, hasn't
your ability to sell your program been undercut too?

Creating a better product is a legitimate activity (that's what the
market system is trying to promot after all (not saying the market
system is right, but it is relevant since many people believe in it)).
The whole question is whether copying your code is legitimate. Drawing
an analogy from art and clearly patent-able products, it seems software
might fall into the same category of protectable products. Again, this
is the question at hand.

Either scenario has NOTHING to do with thieves breaking into your house
and locks on doors. The analogy is bogus. Undercutting your ability to
sell a product is not theft, and compiling source code to machine code is
not analogous to a lock on the door.



Whether it "seems" to be a good investment is quite different from whether
it *is* a good investment.

If they ask me for advice, I'll tell them that they're almost certainly
wasting their time, that their algorithm almost certainly isn't as
valuable as they think, and that if they disagree, well, Python supports

So it's your opinion against the author's, no? And the decision is up
to the author, and not you, no?

.pyc files, there are tools like py2exe which will put their Python code
inside an exe file, there is a Python obfuscator, and a few other tricks.
If none of those things are good enough for them, then Python is not the
language they want to be using.

That seems good, but you also seem to have something against the whole
idea of stronger protections for Python. I don't think loose
protections has to be an inherent feature of Python.

As for the rest of your post, it is mostly irrelevant. However, I will
answer one last point:

[snip]

Even if we don't take the "twice" figure literally, I imagine
that most of us would agree that the amount that the bar can be raise
is considerable and not insignificant.

I dispute that "most of us" agree that the bar can be raised a
considerable amount. It is my position that in the real world, as opposed
to the fantasies of amateur programmers, compiling code is virtually NO
BARRIER to your competitors understanding your algorithm.

Anyone willing to take a good survey? Until then, I think we can just
disagree over that point.

Perhaps you would like to consider how it is that black-hat hackers and
virus writers can analyse Microsoft Windows for vulnerabilities and
security holes *without access to the source code*?

Yes, but wouldn't it be much easier for those vulnerabilities to be
discovered if the code were released? Black-hats also have to advantage
that MS announces vulnerabilities for them, which they take advantage
of during the period where people are patching their windows.

(And by the way: your suggestion that Microsoft has very few workers is
wrong. Microsoft has approximately 60,000 employees, and that almost
certainly doesn't include the many sub-contractors they hire.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/microsoft.html )

I'd say that's not a large number (I was more or less aware that ms has
ten's of thousands of emploees), but obviously you'd disagree with
that...

 

[danielx]

But we have only considered the economics of such a decision. Even if
there is no market value to a work, a person has an understandable
desire to exercise the rights of ownership over a work, given the
amount of personal investment one makes in producing it.

There are other motivations, too. An author might wish that their work
convey a particular message and that others should not be able to make
derived works which distort or contradict that message. However, there
are various established principles of fair use which limit the author's
control over such derived works.

[...]

I think the above idea is frequently missed in discussions about
copyrights/patents in the open source world. There, the focus seems to
be on the marketability granted by protections (legal or physical). The
post I am responding to illustrates this focus. Do we believe an author
forfeits ownership of a work merely by sharing it? As a matter of
conscience, I don't believe the answer can be imposed on anyone. Every
person must answer this for him or herself.

As we've mentioned above, one crucial issue is control over published
works and over the potentially related works of others. With software,
such control is mediated by the licence which is often prominent, even
unavoidable when using proprietary software; thus, people using or
distributing software should be aware of the licence which applies to
the work. In contrast, works in areas such as popular music are not

While I agree with most of your post, I think the point should be made
that eula's don't hold up very well in US courts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA#Enforceability

prominently "labelled" with licensing information if you're listening
to that music playing on the radio, television, in a public space, and
so on. This apparent "promiscuity" with such works leads people to
believe that they are freely exchangeable and that the author is not
exercising control, even if that isn't really the case due to the
framework established by the recording industry for broadcasters.

So, people perceive an apparent lack of control as some kind of lack of
ownership, that the work has, by being shared in an apparently

Extremely interesting point! This should really motivate people to
answer the question I posed earlier: Does an author of software forfeit
his rights to the code if he shares his program (ie, reliquishes
_complete_ protection over the code)?

Let's say this happens: I want to sell some software, but I'm affraid
people will just copy it. So I prototype it in Python (or whatever
programming language) and never release the program. Based on that, I
design a chip (I know this is nearly impossible, but we are doing a
mental experiment), which does exactly the same thing.

First of all, the chip can be reverse engineered (of course, with MUCH
greater difficulty than the equivalent code). Should I still be worried
that my invention will be copied?

A second point to consider: The chip is patentable (I think this is the
case legally, as well as in the court of public opinion), so what about
the equivalent code?

 

[Gerhard Fiedler]

A second point to consider: The chip is patentable (I think this is the
case legally, as well as in the court of public opinion),

No. A chip is not patentable. In your scenario, the /idea/ behind the
chip's functionality may be patentable, but for a patent it doesn't matter
whether the idea is realized as a custom chip or as software running on a
standard computer.

Differently from copyright (which is about a specific form), patents are
about ideas. They must have a realization (ie. you must be able to show
that it can work), but the patent encompasses all realizations of the
described idea. (It may of course be non-trivial to determine whether a
given modification has been described in the patent or not...)

Gerhard

 

[Paul Boddie]

[The suggestion that works apparently given away unconditionally become
part of common culture.]

Extremely interesting point! This should really motivate people to
answer the question I posed earlier: Does an author of software forfeit
his rights to the code if he shares his program (ie, reliquishes
_complete_ protection over the code)?

Well, although some software may be used without the user being
particularly aware of the licence, licences such as the GPL are defined
in terms of distribution. The authors of that licence perhaps realised
that grounding such an agreement in terms of the usage or performance
of a work may be susceptible to the misunderstandings which seem to
have plagued the music industry.

Listening to music over the radio is in practice an involuntary act,
whereas recording and redistributing the music is something that one
actively has to do. The apparent difference between broadcast popular
music and software is that software typically arrives with a licence
(or one is typically forced to view such a licence before downloading
it), and that redistributing software is an act where any later
argument that one was not aware of the licence would be a less credible
defence.

Of course, copyright laws may state that a work without a licence is
"strongly owned" by the author in that redistribution is prohibited,
but as I noted earlier this seems to have been perceived as
counter-intuitive, especially where the work is widely "performed" for
free.

Let's say this happens: I want to sell some software, but I'm affraid
people will just copy it. So I prototype it in Python (or whatever
programming language) and never release the program. Based on that, I
design a chip (I know this is nearly impossible, but we are doing a
mental experiment), which does exactly the same thing.

I don't think it's an unreasonable suggestion.

First of all, the chip can be reverse engineered (of course, with MUCH
greater difficulty than the equivalent code). Should I still be worried
that my invention will be copied?

It used to be said that the first people to buy the latest games
console were the competition.

A second point to consider: The chip is patentable (I think this is the
case legally, as well as in the court of public opinion), so what about
the equivalent code?

This is why people are very worried about the scope of patents
gradually expanding from areas where companies have sought some kind of
incentive for investment in manufacturing, for example, to areas where
patents have actually been forbidden in the past, such as in computer
software. Sadly, there's a kind of misguided attitude amongst
law-makers (particularly certain "visionaries" in the European Union)
who think they're encouraging innovation when unquestioningly accepting
arguments that if technology A is patentable and if technology B is
like technology A, then technology B should be patentable, rather than
considering that patents on technology A should also be forbidden.

Paul

 

[Slawomir Nowaczyk]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:35:37 -0700

#> Slawomir Nowaczyk wrote:
#> > On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 17:35:27 -0700
#> >
#> > #> 2. I've never done this, but you might be able to encrypt or otherwise
#> > #> turn you modules into binary form, and then use a clever import
#> > #> hook.
#> >
#> > Please observe that whatever the "clever import hook" is, it actually
#> > needs to know the way to *decrypt* the module (secret key or
#> > whatever). It means that if somebody decompiles the importing code, he
#> > can just as well decompile the "hidden" one.

Please do not top-post...

#> I'm pretty sure that just because someone is familiar with the PGP
#> sources, for example, doesn't mean that they have the necessary keys to
#> access other people's data across the internet. Also, I'm pretty sure I
#> know how a prison door lock works, but if I'm behind bars and don't
#> have the key, I'm still screwed.
#>
#> I believe the same things applies here. Just because you can see the
#> import code, depending upon what it does, if it requires (for example)
#> a key in order to decrypt the binary data before the modules can be
#> loaded, then no matter how much you understand the import code, the
#> data itself (that is the binary encrypted modules) is still useless to
#> you.

Not really. The thing is, whatever data is actually required to
perform the decryption, *must* be available in the importing code...
as this code needs to -- by definition -- be able to decrypt the
binaries into a form understandable by the CPU. After all, the code is
supposed to actually work.

As far as your analogy goes, you *do* have a key to the prison door,
because you are *expected* to be able to let yourself out.

--
Best wishes,
Slawomir Nowaczyk
( (e-mail address removed) )

War doesn't determine who's right, war determines who's left.