As we had some private communication already I knew about your move to ThinLinc. And to be honest, our organization (ca. 800 employees with about 200 sunrays) has already decided to move away from the Sunray technology due to the bad licensing and similar technical issues you report at your blog. In fact, I am currently evaluating the Thinlinc technology and its potential. Our first tests look quite promising, but we have to do some more testing and financial calculations to judge if moving to ThinLinc and a different Thinclient would really do good for us. In the end we don't want to end at the same one way road which we are currently in due to the disappointing political decisions Oracle made with the otherwise stunning sunray technology.
Hi. I agree with Tobias Oetiker; the Sun Ray terminals are really nice, but you cannot escape the fact that they are tied to a single server software vendor. With ThinLinc and many other products, you can use terminals from HP, Dell, Fujitsu, IGEL etc. So, if you later want to move away from, say, ThinLinc (of course very unlikely :-), you can most likely keep your terminals.
Many vendors are also offering very competitive prices if you are buying thin terminals in volume.
I agree, in that respect it would be reassuring if cendio were not obfuscating their python scripts ... at least the core technologies are opensource, and they do take our support calls very seriously.Oh, they are obfuscating their python scripts on purpose? This seems to be a rather bad approach as apart from the java and openldap stuff the sunray server software can be nicely tuned by changing the tons of shell scripts they use. However, if they just obfuscate their python script there should be a deobfuscating tool around somewhere to get the scripts formatted nicely again ;) But I agree, Cendio should not go the same one way route like Oracle by obfuscating/hiding things. Flexibility and freedom is very important for us. So thanks for pointing that out to me so that I can have a look at that during my evaluation of the ThinLinc software.
Yes, we are obfuscating the Python code with "pyobfuscate" (https://github.com/astrand/pyobfuscate/), which I wrote 10 years ago or so. De-obfuscating is to some extent possible, but the original comments, names etc are of course lost.
So, why are we doing this? It's because of the business model. ThinLinc is a product consisting of about 80% Open Source code and 20% proprietary code. For the open parts, we are working closely with the upstream projects, and shipping the source code with the final product. When the comes to the proprietary part, we are basically delivering "binaries", just like most other software vendors, and the source code for those parts is not openly available. (But a software Escrow Service through the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce is possible.) Now, since we are using multiple programming languages and runtime environments, those "binaries" may look differently. With C/C++, we have regular ELF binaries, but for the Python parts, we are doing the obfuscation. Another alternative could have been the Java approach of shipping byte code, but this does not work very well with Python. It also provides less flexibility than obfuscated code; with obfuscated code you can more easily change strings/paths, constants etc. We have also taken care so that tracebacks preserves the original line numbers.
It is unlikely that we would make ThinLinc 100% Open Source at this time; we are not planning publishing the source code for ELF binaries such as "tl-session" etc in a near future. We may consider tweaking just the obfuscation of the Python scripts though. Feedback is always appreciated. The thinlinc-technical mailing list can be used to avoid too much off topic discussions on this list.
Best regards, ---
Peter Åstrand ThinLinc Chief Developer Cendio AB http://cendio.com Teknikringen 8 http://twitter.com/ThinLinc 583 30 Linköping http://facebook.com/ThinLinc Phone: +46-13-214600 http://plus.google.com/112509906846170010689
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