From: "Joe Landman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Technological measures can be defeated. Assume they provide speed bumps
at most to determined hackers.
We have found that people are (sometimes) willing to pay for programs when
they add significant value to what it is they are doing. That said, much
of the reason we see our customers interested in open source has very
little to do with libre' and a great deal to do with acquisition cost.
The often higher quality is an added benefit.
Bla bla. You are living in USA probably, where what you said is not bla bla,
but I am living in Romania, Central Europe where even stronger laws than
those regarding the piracy are not always respected. In my country there are
no many people that care for what you said. Most of the users use pirated
programs... more than 90% of the private persons, and over 50% of the
companies, or even more.
What stops them from doing un-intended things with it are good licenses
that grant them the rights they require without granting them the rights
they do not require. You are not granting ownership rights, you grant
usage rights.
So? They will get the source code and give the program to other persons,
that won't need to pay for it anymore.
Who stops them doing that? Do you think there is an institution in my
country that visits the private persons and check to see if they have
licences? Not even the companies care about that. Business Software Alliance
of MS, Oracle, Corel, SAP and a few other companies visit from time to time
the companies, and then they negociate with them for selling them some more
licences, because they are found that they have illegal software. That's
all.
You may chose to restrict these rights, or not grant them at all. In this
case, you may need to review which elements of OSS you may yourself use in
your program.
I cannot do this all the time, because for example I need to create a
program that won't even probably have access to the internet.
It is a program that should work with a phone exchange for showing
statistics about the number of spoken minutes for each line, and other
things like that.
I need to create a Windows version and a Linux version also. It will be
accessible in a web page, in the local intranet of the company, and it would
be nice if it could be done with Catalyst, but of course, without showing
the source code.
I have not seen many users, who have a day job that requires that the get
specific work done, try to crack program source code, or reverse engineer
their apps. It all comes down to the value you offer, and what you are
willing to enable.
No, of course they are not paid for this, but the system admin of some
companies could try to get the source code, and give it to his friends from
other companies.
Protection has its purposes, though compiling programs is not what I would
call protection. If you want to protect you need to mix encryption with
some sort of preventative execution measure, a DRM of sorts. This
provides something akin to a higher speedbump, but it is only a speedbump.
It is not absolute protection. The only way to get better protection is
to never ship the application, only the side effects. Google doesn't ship
its applications, though they are some of the most widely used in the
world. I am willing to be that the critical internal bits are not OSS.
I didn't say I want an absolute protection. I said what I need, but you try
to convince me that what I want is bad, just because Catalyst cannot do it.
The protection perlapp offers is very good for what I need.
It is a very bad marketing to tell the client that the program he paid for
is open source, because most of the users might think that in that case the
program has no value, or that it could be very simple and that everyone else
could get it for free, but he is forced to pay for it. And of course, he
will get it and give to other friends that might need it.
Hmmm.... So you think they should spend at least $90US of time to get the
program from the internal representation?
So do you know about B::Deparse?
Oh yes, it would be very well if the program could be cracked only using
B::Deparse.
In that case I can consider the source code secure enough.
The cracker must get the compiled version of the program from the memory,
then use B::Deparse, and hope it will give good results... this is not a
problem for me.
I would suggest reflecting upon which goals you have in preventing access
to source. Is it prevention of modification, protection of IP,
restriction of redistribution ...
It is restriction to redistribution what I want, and the laws don't help me
at all.
Even to try putting the law work for me, and find the crackers, would cost
me more than I can earn.
But I don't know if I understood correctly... from this discussion I
think that it is not possible to do what I want using Catalyst.
This has nothing to do with Catalyst. This is (not really) a language
issue, and more correctly a basic computing issue. Unless your code is
always encrypted, in memory, on disk, etc. there is little possibility to
prevent a determined hacker from getting it. So if you take this off the
plate, that is, you make it so that getting at the source is not hard at
all, you effectively remove that attack vector against your code. Now
focus upon what it is you do. Heck, you can even hide your IP back behind
a nice XML-RPC/SOAP stack on a remote system or three, and distribute the
rest as OSS.
The computers of users are not always connected to the internet, so I cannot
use this method.
I don't want an absolute security but just a way of hiding the source code
and making harder to get it. perlapp can store the source code crypted, in
memory, and it also has other advantages over PAR.
Other programs can be used to include all the modules they need in the
executable, while Catalyst cannot do it.
This is what I said that Catalyst cannot do, or better said, I don't know
how to do it, because I am almost sure it should be possible.
Ok, the issue sounds like windows. I don't want to comment on its support
as I don't use it for this. We use Linux for our work, all of this works
just fine.
Of course Linux works just fine, but for very few people comparing with
Windows, and I don't care what the users use, but sell my program. I have
also noticed that most Linux users are users that know more about computers,
that like only open/free source programs, and it is almost impossible to
sell them something, because they think that all the programs should be
free.
When talking for the public, they say that it is not important to have the
programs for free, but have the source code, in order to see what it does,
and beeing able to modify it for their own use, however, in fact they'll
never like to buy software and always try to use free software, even
pretending the the extra features provided by commercial software are not
important.
I have heard for many times that PostgreSQL is same as good as Oracle, and
that the extra features Oracle has are not very important, and the
disadvantages of proprietary software are always presented by those who like
Linux. I haven't heard a single person that says that he like Linux, but
that he also agrees buying commercial programs.
FWIW: I have tried recent Catalyst under Cygwin (www.cygwin.com) and it
seems to work fine (thanks to MST and lots of others). If you are
constrained to work on windows, try cygwin.
I am constraint to work under Windows, but this is not the only reason I am
interested about this OS. I am interested because most of the users use it
and if I'll target only the Linux users, I won't be able to sell anything,
or much less.
With ActivePerl, perlapp, and Null Soft installer and other tools provided
by Active State I can develop programs for Windows just like those made with
Visual Basic, so it is possible to create Windows programs with perl.
Probably very few people will find that the program was created using perl.
If I can hide the source code I can put a software protection, a key or
something like this, but if the source code is free, any user could just
edit the source code and disable that protection, even if the user doesn't
know perl.
And I might need to create the program for a software company that requires
to hide the source code. I cannot tell them that they are stupid because the
source code can be found anyway. That's what they are asking, and I need to
give them this if it is possible.
No software company will agree to make open source programs for them,
because they won't be able to sell them.
I think what I want could be done, and in that case Catalyst would be used
in more other fields than the standard web pages.
Octavian
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