What ideas are floating around about mixing open source and closed source using Pharo? I am implementing an IEC Standard object model for electrical power systems to provide a platform for developing electrical applications. I am considering the case where a company may maintain the model of their electrical power distribution network in the open source platform, but then buy various commercial plug-ins perform different calculations upon the shared model. Here are the options I can imagine...
1. Using fuel to load binary packages within the one image without the source. Currently available technology but viewing and decompiling bytecode is still possible - but to what degree this enables reverse engineering I am not sure.
2. Having VM support for restricting displaying/decompiling bytecode. To avoid the ease of switching to another VM without this restriction, the fuel package could be encrypted with a key match one compiled inside the required VM.
3. Running multiple images on a single VM such that the VM passing message calls efficiently between the two images like an "enterprise bus*" - one open source and one closed source. Any common base objects between the images might be shared on a copy-on-write basis.
What are your thoughts? cheers -ben
