Currently?... roughly E 24,74° N 60,16° ... and remember what happened to cat ;-) A
________________________________ Lähettäjä: Mike Jenne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Lähetetty: ke 31.5.2006 14:27 Vastaanottaja: 'Joutsiniemi Anssi'; [email protected] Aihe: RE: [MI-L] [SUM:] MBX documentation Anssi, I may have missed it earlier, but where are you located? Just curious... Mike Jenne JCSI Trussville, Alabama USA -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joutsiniemi Anssi Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 5:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [MI-L] [SUM:] MBX documentation Dear Friends, Within past 24 hours there has been a rather impulsive discussion on controversial suggestion of mine to document what MBX's are made of. Bill, Uffe, 3*Ian, Rich, Trey + less than half dozen anonymous persons expessed they opinions that seem to refer pretty much same issues, that I'll try to summarize (but unfortunatelly without satisfying conclusion). Please find who said what from the original thread. Personally I have a great sympathy for general attitude expressed by Rich. I'm truly in favour of all this freedom of information, speech etc. slightly romantic peace-love-good-happiness stuff. Yet very much aware it confronting M$ world and interests of McInfo Corp I have chosen too. Stagnation by choose I'd say. Even though I still feel that file formats are closer to mathematical formulas than intellectual property, I can see the dim line between hacking information and third party cracking abuse... I guess the big issue never got solved: What differentiates the good use from the bad one? Clearly decompiling code that is not you own is generally a no, no thing. But decompiling itself can have also its positive sides. Lost source codes, version detection, spoting stolen snippets seem to be silently accepted usages, since the decompilability it is kind of unavoidable feature of MBX, that is hard to escape. The problem remains: Who should be worried about this? Who should act? A rich discussion was found using the information for compiler building. A fruitfull approach was a suggestion for Open Source Compiler by a group of MI users. Unfortunatelly I'm not skilled enough to carry a project this big (, otherwise I'd probably done it by now), but naturally I'm glad to help if someone is willing to take an initiative. The difficult issue is how it could be done by law, since it easily becomes legal issue of Corp. Half the U.S. nation is lawyers and other half potential criminals, so possibly some of the first ones follow the list as well and this can be discussed in detail if necessary. ;o) Counting pros & cons of discussion I have a feeling that at this point the misuse of information is much, much easier and likelly than the potential benefits. Personally I think the threads discussed got little exaggerated and emotional, but I guess it is worth waiting if the balance shifts other way around or otherwise interesting projects emerge. Thanks for your interest, Bye now Anssi _______________________________________________ MapInfo-L mailing list [email protected] http://www.directionsmag.com/mailman/listinfo/mapinfo-l _______________________________________________ MapInfo-L mailing list [email protected] http://www.directionsmag.com/mailman/listinfo/mapinfo-l
