My dirty mind and Open Source

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sun Oct 6 11:11:30 EDT 2013


What made me wake up with this idea at 3 o'clock in the morning I don't 
know; probably a result of
an odd conversation where I was trying to explain to my wife the idea of 
'Copyleft' and not doing very well
the day before.

RunRev have been careful to remove the capability to password protect 
stacks in the 'Community' version
of Livecode; so that anyone who wants can access both stacks and 
standalones made with that version
and read the code.

Now, as far as I understand, Copyright agreements (just been trying to 
translate a Bulgarian one, with my wife, into English and getting rather 
bogged down) are designed to "bind up yon dangling apricocks" as Master
Shakespeare would have it; to restrict what an end-user can do with a 
thing, particularly with the
component of a product that is rather abstract; the intellectual property.

Now, as far as I understand, Copyleft agreements are things that attempt 
to do the opposite of what
Copyright agreements do; put all sorts of constraints in place to stop 
people grabbing something open source
and peddling it as theirs and copyright.

That's all jolly well and good.

BUT . . .

Come the criminal mastermind who doesn't "give a monkey's" for either 
Copyright or Copyleft agreements
who hires a rogue programmer to either:

1. Buy a copy of the commercial version of Livecode and use it to 
password protect the stacks of someone's
Open Source work . . .

2. Hack some Open Source stacks in such a way that they become 
inaccessible to those who want to read the code . . .

And then slam a socking great "Made by Criminal Mastermind Industries" 
image across the front and start
minting the moolah on the basis of his/her stolen software.

SO . . .

If this in NOT in place . . .

Would it not be a good idea to roll code into the Community edition 
specifically to prevent scenarios like
the above?

Richmond.

P.S. If I'm going to be Long John Silver guess who is going to be Jack 
Hawkins!




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