well, if the code is published, then you can modify, even if you have to retype from print and work from there, yes? Its just more work and you have to know what youre doing.
On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Jed Rothwell<[email protected]> wrote: > Alexander Hollins wrote: > >> well, if its open source, then by definition, anyone can edit it and >> recompile their own version. > > The term "open source" has different meanings. Thirty years ago it meant > that the source code is published, not that anyone could modify it. > Obviously that was impossible in any case, before the Internet. Today it > often means anyone can modify the code. That's a bad idea, in my opinion. > > The source code for many programs used to be distributed. In some cases, > such as with Data General Business Basic applications software, you had to > provide it. That was a pseudo-interpreter language. (It converted to tokens > as you typed the code.) This meant that anyone could look at the code and > tweak it, but you would only purchase the program from the vendor, who > supplied the correct version, on 8" floppy disks. If you tweaked it > yourself, you had to fix it yourself. > > Data General computers were used in elections to count votes. I do not know > if they used Business Basic but changing memory locations and hard disk > contents and the like was easy with those machines, so any programmer worth > his salt could have stolen an election via a modem connection. (The system > manager password was usually left unchanged.) Data General computers had > many virtues but security was not among them. Of course there was no > Internet so to secure one, all you had to do was disconnect the modem. > > - Jed > >
