Re: Restrictware... But this is for help science, of course!
On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 10:58:51AM +0200, Solal wrote: I found a dangerous thing, a new excuse for restrictware creators to restrict freedom : We have not outsourced the client for several reasons, relating to client reliability and other issues. However, we?ve come up with a compromise ? we have been developing a plug in architecture to allow people to write open source (sic) code that we can plug into our client. Except that this isn't at all a new excuse; game developers have been doing this, particularly in the Flash game community, for many years. If you let people see and modify the client, the argument goes, then people will be able to cheat. Hilariously, people always find a way to cheat anyway, and you can see high scores of 9 on most Flash game high score tables. The general principle of trust, but verify should be pounded more reliably into the brains of programmers, especially ones dealing with distributed networks or server/client architectures :) -- Mark Holmquist Software Engineer, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation mtrac...@member.fsf.org https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
Restrictware... But this is for help science, of course!
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 I found a dangerous thing, a new excuse for restrictware creators to restrict freedom : We have not outsourced the client for several reasons, relating to client reliability and other issues. However, we’ve come up with a compromise — we have been developing a plug in architecture to allow people to write open source (sic) code that we can plug into our client. The author of its sentence is (weirdly) Stanford University. The restrictware is in this case Folding@home. For peoples who don't know what's Folding@home, this is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics. The project uses the idle processing resources of thousands of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Its primary purpose is to determine the mechanisms of protein folding, which is the process by which proteins reach their final three-dimensional structure, and to examine the causes of protein misfolding. This is of significant academic interest with major implications for medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.[1] For a software destinated to save lifes, make it a restrictware seems to be bad and dangerous. The argument itself makes no sense, SETI@home (for search aliens) is GPLed and found a great way to verify the result integrity.[2] [0]: http://folding.stanford.edu/home/faq/faq-opensource#ntoc4 [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home#Competitive_aspect -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin) Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.org Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJTiZnLAAoJEAkexyki2U7q838IAIcvqUJ0GysDQ+P6YHSPp2UV Eg2vODYooEvFYKzdwT1lnpg0qEhEwW1ed4pn9+sDSMHC4DaCECZxJ63BvtRNmqFe uvIOw72OJ+OXeSwia8fqaN7wJztM71Ku9aNpwLEnTXK40ICgKGscMUUTBlznhU4m Gd7nLClBPDWGKkdjNTantVgmCoStvIKoNSl/UpVO0RN7Mr35gftchlUvuxCkfCdH lwbYc+hDGhAUCoEMLtko/7acyDTDTdaZ8f/u1ok5phl1jZUF6O9TpCTLuhng9IPb Cr634K5Uf0rW/6LWvUrhqlZocS8cXhs0IZcqUZ8n3oM7NSrFvIhYdMMApesbJr8= =VLKX -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
