[ic] Encrypting IC pages on server?

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org (Barry Treahy, Jr.)]

John Beima wrote:

>Quoting Kevin Walsh <kevin@cursor.biz>:
>
>>John Beima [jbeima@palb.com] wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>>It seems that you're not familiar with the concept and ideals of Open
>>>>Source software, which makes me wonder why you're using Interchange
>>>>in the first place.
>>>>
>>>>In accordance with the GPL, your modified Interpolate.pm would have to
>>>>be released to your clients in a readable form.  Your clients would
>>>>then be free to examine the decryption method used.  Armed with this
>>>>information, it would be trivial to create a utility to decrypt every
>>>>one of the encrypted pages you supply.
>>>>
>>>All we have to do is provide Interchange in a readable format, not the
>>>additions, since they will be a copyrighted and SOLD product.
>>>
>>You have been misinformed.  Perhaps you should read the GPL license, under
>>which Interchange is distributed.  It appears that you really have no idea
>>what the terms "Open Source" and "Free Software" mean.
>>
>>><!-- Copyright (c) 2002 Company Name Here. -->
>>>Does nothing. When you have the odd questionable client, that guts code
>>>      
>>>
>>and
>>    
>>
>>>steals it for other projects they were never authorized to use it on.
>>>
>>"Guts code and steals it," that would be questionable behaviour, yes.
>>Let's hope that people don't start doing that with Interchange.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually this seems to have very much got off on a tangent.
>
>Do to several people jumping to conclusions.
>
>01) We do NOT plan on altering the Interchange distribute at all. Our clients
>will be able to download a clean copy off of the current, or any, Interchange
>FTP server.
>
>02) Our scripts will be distributed seperately & patched in at the time of install.
>
I believe one of the points that folks have attempted to make is that 
these 'scripts' that patch IC, are still creating a derivative work of 
IC which under the GPL must still be made available to the public 
domain.  Presuming that your modifications could all be limited to say 
just the Interpolate.pm module, I believe the ONLY way that you can 
circumvent the license issue is to create a fresh, independent work that 
functionally emulates all of Interpolate.pm without any of the original 
code.

Personally, I think you are wasting your time simply because once it has 
been decrypted and can be executed by Perl, your security measures are 
toast and I've been around in the IT biz for over two decades and have 
seen multitudes of 'security protection schemes' that have all either 
failed or totally alienated their customers because of the headaches, 
failures and flaws in use that they introduce.

One last request, please either get rid of your signature or at least 
make it tolerable in length as 25 lines is far in excess of the 3 to 5 
lines that most consider acceptable etiquette...

Barry

-- 

Barry Treahy, Jr  *  Midwest Microwave  *  Vice President & CIO 

E-mail: Treahy@mmaz.com * Phone: 480/314-1320 * FAX: 480/661-7028