On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 10:09:41 +1000 Nick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> babbled: > Daniel Kasak wrote: > > >Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: > > > > > > > >>fact: once source is available it IS able to be stolen. the chances of being > >>able to lift large chunks of useful code (eg take the image scaling > >>routines or the alpha blending routines) which is where a lot of the really > >>tight code is, is tirival. no one would ever know. reformat it a bit and > >>that's it. there is very little you can do. you will never know its stolen. > >>its part of a much larger codebase that suddenly is faster and nicer. we > >>have not the resources to ... > >> > >This argument works when dealing with smaller organisations. I know that > >the KHTML people are pissed off with Apple ( who use KHTML in Safari ) > >for not following the 'spirit' of the GPL and detailing their changes in > >change logs, patches, etc, and actually participating in the community. > >They simply make the source of their derived works available, and people > >are left to wade through it and try to discover what's happened in the > >meantime. So the point is that they're not particularly worried about > >maintaining their own fork, and also that the GPL has at least given the > >KHTML developers *something*. > > > >I can certainly see smaller organisations being more willing to > >co-operate though. > > > > > > The abiword people have had some sort of extended issue with a company > who's proprietary word processor happens to parse Microsoft Word files > with amazingly similar behavior and bugs to abiword's code and abiword > symbols seem to be in that company's binaries for some reason. > > I guess it may be harder to pull somethin like that for a set of gfx > related libraries like enlightenment's , but I'm a bit hungover so I > have no chance of imagining how people would go about doing this.
even gpl isn't helping them there if they have no way to sick lawyers on them and force them to disclose. of course this comapny si stupid - they left the function calls named the same? HAH! *IF* i were to be in their shoes, stealing. i woudl run sed over the code, renaming functions, symbols and such, rename files reformat/re-indent them, move variable blocks around (harmlessly), rename variables, re-order their declarations, definitely remove/retype commants, and then go and re-do some loops etc. (replace while (1) with for(;;) etc.) -i ie do a lot of harmless restructuring thatw should make the code quite dissimilar at an even good glance. (rename any strings you can as well - etc.) sure it might take a few days but less time than typing it up. for every stupid idiot that steals code - imagine how many smarter ones theer are that get away with it. :) now why do they steal and not give back? the price is high! thats why. theft occurs when the cost of doing it "legally" is so high the risk of getting caught is worth the risk. like any activity at all actually. so i guess bsd + advertising/attribution (which CAN be met by giving code out too alal lgpl) is i guess a way to make the cost low - "you only have to give out the code in question and the mods you made to THAT code" or "let everyone knwo you use us so we know to track you and try and convince you the nice way to open up more" :) -- ------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" -------------- The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 裸好多 Tokyo, Japan (東京 日本) ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
