aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM (10/16/88)
>Peter ("Have you hugged your wolf today?") deSilva seems to think the point >of a uMIIL is to provide a medium for selling software, a way for it to be >distributed in machine-independent form that nosy hackers can't read and >modify. > >Excuse me, but I thought the security problem in for-sale software was to guard >it from unauthorized *copying* and *use*, not unauthorized *understanding*! A >uMIIL does nothing for the real problem, since by definition it has to be easy >to copy and run on lots of machines. > > Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) > UUCP: ...!{uunet,att,rutgers}!snark!eric = eric@snark.UUCP > Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718 I have been involved in maintaining several licenced software packages, and in all cases I was free to make backups and copies - as long as I did not move them to other machines, or violate the licence. The copying wars are largely a PC phenomenom, and are much less apparent on minis and larger computers. Mini customers, however, have a large investment in their binary software, that prevents them from thinking about buying a new machine that is not binary compatible. They would like to be able to buy their software *once*, and run it on every machine they might buy in the near future. Hence the interest in a _portable_ format for selling software in. Third party software vendors, however, do not want to sell software in a portable, high level, format that would make it easier to reverse engineer their trade secrets. Hence the interest in a _portable_ _hard-to-understand_ form. Of course, there is also the rather obvious point that if you can understand a piece of software, you can copy it and transform it so that it is hard to prove the origin. This would make it even harder to prosecute software theft than it is now, when binary copying makes it fairly obvious where the software was stolen from. Please note: I hope that all of this sort of thing will be unnecessary when source code for all applications is freely available to all. Vas-y GNU! Andy "Krazy" Glew. at: Motorola Microcomputer Division, Champaign-Urbana Development Center (formerly Gould CSD Urbana Software Development Center). mail: 1101 E. University, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA. email: (Gould addresses will persist for a while) aglew@gould.com - preferred, if you have MX records aglew@fang.gould.com - if you don't ...!uunet!uiucuxc!ccvaxa!aglew - paths may still be the only way My opinions are my own, and are not the opinions of my employer, or any other organisation. I indicate my company only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards our products. PS. I promise to shorten this .signature soon.