Hi americans :-) Please try to understand that the situation is not everywhere like in USA regarding the respect for copyright, including the respect for open source licenses.
I have seen the suggestion for protecting the code by a license for many times, but there are countries where those licenses don't have any real value, even if the laws theoreticly protect the copyright. So the programmer works for the source code, makes it open source, and then comes another programmer that gets it, delete the name of the author, make some changes, and then sell the program pretending it is his code, and sometimes the second programmer has more relations and can contact more clients. In USA there are ways of protections, but in other countries there are not. If the programmer who made the program cannot protect it in any way, he won't be able to survive by creating open source programs then providing different type of services, because there will be other guys that will take his potential clients, using his work. This is one of the reasons perl has a big disadvantage. The programmers prefer to be able to encrypt the programs made in PHP using Zend Encoder or other tools. I think that if mod_perl programs could be very well encrypted, this technology would be a little more used than it is now, but they can't, and if this is a disadvantage for some of us, we shouldn't say that the programmers shouldn't need such a thing. Teddy ----- Original Message ----- From: "David E. Wheeler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Aug 25, 2006, at 09:58, Jonathan Vanasco wrote: > > > at that point, i realized two things: > > > > a- encrypting/obfuscating perl code just doesn't work when you > > need to decrypt it. it also doesn't work when there are > > decompilers and stuff out there. the best you can do is make > > something marginally difficult. > > b- given the ease in decrypting the code, and the code itself, it > > became pretty obvious that they weren't trying to protect the code, > > as much as they were making it unreadable as it was some of the > > worst stuff i've ever seen.
