On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 21:14:56 +0200
Boris Koenig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hi !
>
> I have just received a reply from IVAO's 'chief developer' -
> as soon as he says that it's okay to post his reply to this
> list, I'm going to post the full text.
>
> However, in summary: they would support an opensource client
> for their network, PROVIDED that their rules are respected,
> ***BUT*** they DO NOT want to publish their protocol specs,
> because of security issues they had in the past, so what
> they're trying to do is to provide security by hiding the
> details of the exact implementation (pretty Micro$oft-like).
>
> I _interpreted_ their reply like that: they would provide
> a binary library that we could link 'our' client/FG to.
>
> But the protocol would still be theirs, and not known
> to us.
One solution to these sorts of issues is that taken by the Netrek
folks of years past. The Netrek clients, the Paradise Netrek
clients, etc., were open source. You could do with them whatever
you wanted, and their protocols for passing data back and forth
with the server were thus obvious. However, in order to avoid
people hacking their clients to give their ships superpowers in
the networked multiplayer games, they restricted access to their
servers to only "blessed" clients -- clients that successfully
passed an authentication procedure (e.g. signed md5sums of themselves
which match keys and md5sums on file) Hacking the source will cause
the client to fail the authentication, and the server won't accept
its connection. This didn't violate the GPL -- you could do
whatever you wanted with the source, and you could always set up
your own servers (using available source) with no such restrictions
on "blessed" clients. They merely were setting restrictions on
who they were going to provide *their* server connections to.
-c
--
Chris Metzler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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