Carlos H. Cantu wrote: > So far, there is no official way to hide procedures and > triggers source code (protecting intelectual property). The > technique of updating system tables writing "null" to the > source code is used by a lot of people, since it seems to be > the only way to have some kind of protection (ok, BLR can be > "understood", but this would required more efforts than > usually normal people are willing to do). > > Problem is that this technique will not work anymore in > Firebird 3. Since there is still no official way to > protect/hide the source code, I suggest that the > rdb$procedures and rdb$triggers should not become readonly > until we have an official way to deal with this problem.
> I think this is a critical decision that should be discussed > now, otherwise we can expect lots of mad users when FB 3 is > released. Just an observation about the nature of this stuff, rather than an argument against your suggestion ... Once this becomes an officially sanctioned way to "protect" your code, it seems likely that recovery tools would follow. We may go from a system of protection that was never good, but only used by those that were willing to go to the extra bother (and presumably take the extra care), to a system that might be used with less care and understanding and so create a demand better recovery tools. Up to now, the system seems not to have inspired anyone to write a good recovery tool - or not that I've noticed, but then I've never looked beyond the basic BLR viewer that has been in IBObjects for years. An official language feature may well change that. And having, officially, given users a way to shoot themselves in the foot, what do we say to someone that wants to add an option to gfix to recover the lost source code? (After all, ISQL has a metadata extract feature, what was the point of that if we expected users to always have copies of the source they used to create the database? ;-) -- Geoff Worboys Telesis Computing Pty Ltd ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Slashdot TV. Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. http://tv.slashdot.org/ Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
