.NET and OpenSource....

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

Re: .NET and OpenSource....

Cowboy (Gregory A. Beamer) - MVP <NoSpamMgbworld @comcast.netNoS pamM>
wrote:[color=blue]
> I agree, to an extent, but the byte code is like handing your source code
> over to the competition.[/color]

Does your source code really not have any comments or meaningful local
variable names? Also, if I hand source code over to anyone, I usually
hand over design documents etc too. Without all of this, just the real
non-comment code is almost useless, IMO. It may well make it relatively
easy to remove licensing, for example, but actually reverse engineering
the code to understand what's going on is much, much harder. I reckon
that for most software systems the overall system design and
architecture is more important than the implementation code, and the
architecture usually has to be part of the documentation in order to
let users understand the product.

I think it's more of a risk for low-cost software vendors who may lose
sales due to licensing "patches" than competitors reverse engineering.

--
Jon Skeet - <skeet@pobox.co m>

http://www.pobox.com/~skeet

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