On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 10:04:25AM -0700, Ian Erickson wrote: > I would personally like to believe that for the most part - people are > basically good. There will always be a small minority who will seek to > gain from the efforts of others - but for the most part we know who
But it's not the majority that you have to worry about. It's the one or two bad hats out there that do the damage. > Maybe the best way to approach this would be to build a MapBasic > obfuscator. This would be a really cool tool - although (with two > versions of the source code lying around, I would hope you always > remember which was the obfuscated code and which was the "real" code). An obfuscator could read the source code, dump output to a temp directory, change the names and references to all the source modules (i.e. rename the modules during the copy and rewrite the .MBP file), construct a symbol table and rename all the functions, subroutines (excepting Main()) local and global variables, call MapBasic.exe with -D and possibly the -L switches, and then move the MBX back to the source directory or where ever the MBP files says to put it, and then delete the contents of the temp directory. Thus, the only source preserved would be the actual source code, so you wouldn't have to worry about two versions. (Of course, you'd have to be REALLY sure your obfuscator didn't have any bugs in it. Imagine the debugging nightmare should it confuse a subroutine name with a global variable... running that MBX would probably drop your O/S like it was pole-axed. If one knows how to create an MBX directly, then an obfuscator could be built in to a decent IDE and then you could open source the whole thing, and then nobody would have to pay MapInfo $795 to buy MapBasic. Then, I suppose, MapInfo's legal team would have that one for lunch. _______________________________________________ MapInfo-L mailing list [email protected] http://www.directionsmag.com/mailman/listinfo/mapinfo-l
