For me the need for a decompilier has merit when you or your outfit goofs and looses track of the original source code for a utility that worked really great up and until your bought-on to the next version of Pro. But that paranoia is mostly mute as there is a solution gracefully provided by this community - prove yourself and your ownership and help could be had. But there is also an interesting sub-plot IMHO to this thread.
And that is the referral to "well my MB code is valuable and I don't want anyone mucking around in it". That said, I guess there may also be a bit of subliminal frustration in that the programmer in all of this lusts(?) for a better environment, a more potent language, and maybe just something new that re-levels the field a bit? This spills out in the "where is MapInfo in all of this" lament? Don't hold your breath as over the years there has been a dearth of "official" and semi-offical MI comment on threads like this other than when Andy and Eric dropped in. My personal frustration and interest in the thread is I had been hoping (hope is not a business plan) that by now we might have all seen the light of how MapInfo was to evolve the PRO and all other MapInfo products to have a common API(?) base via the .NET engines spawned from John Haller's MapX vision and lead. The unambiguous vision I seek, better yet a timely demonstration, is that indeed valuable legacy MB code sets would be extended into this new MIP code frontier via the clever design that permits old MB code to live along side spanking new .NET design? What I feel we are left with is a "dammed if you do, and dammed if don't" condition to value add via MB for the flagship MIP? FWIW Neil aka MidNight Mapper -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joutsiniemi Anssi Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 8:56 PM 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
