> > I forget who said it, but > > "most people who hide their source do so out of embarassment".
> I really don't agree with that... This probably applies to my personal sourcecode though...! However, I think companies in general just prefer not to give anything away unless they get paid for it > > Truly, there is no reason to hide your source. It only makes me ensure > > that I will never purchase your product. OK, so "we" lost you as a customer... The question is did "we" make more money from the ones we kept...? > ...However I understand your point of view. > > I must say that no matter one does, if someone wants to see your source code > badly enough, they probably will. Yep, this is true of most security. However, most people believe that locking your front door does indeed add substantial security to your home despite it being "trivial" to pick locks, and break windows to gain access. Good quality lock picking guides are available on the internet, yet the majority of people remain ignorant of how to pick locks. Likewise, even "compiling" code remains a fairly reasonable method of preventing *most* people nicking your algorithms. There are good examples that trivial layers of security can prevent easy theft. For example witness how long it took for a linux DVD player to be written. I bet it will be quite a long time before we get a linux SACD or DVD-Audio player as well... (Although I agree that the later case is a poor example in that it has been explicity stated that there will legal repercussions from any attempt to reverse engineer the algorithm details, however, I'm suprised that this is any kind of practical deterent to much of the hacking community...) Just for the record, my position is that I'm pro open-source, but I work for an organisation which won't let me install and use Apache despite the fact it is "free", because they would rather buy IIS so that we can pay someone for a licence and support ... (don't go there, the "why" gets somewhat cloudy when we go into the details). I'm just trying to give some insight into how organisations think...
