Re: Cronyx Tau-ISA obfuscated driver
On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 09:16:25AM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> Cronyx Tau-PCI family will become a third one. The peculiarity of this
> driver that it contains private code. This code is distributed as
> obfuscated source code with usual open source license agreement.Since
> code is protected by obfuscation it is satisfy needs of commerce. On the
> other hand it still stays a source code and thus it becomes closer to
> open source projects. I hope this form of private code distribution will
> become a real alternative to object form.
>
> Free/non-free? (Only an academic interest, I did not use this driver
> yet.)
Depends on what "usual open source licence agreement" is, and how obfuscated
obfuscated is. Certainly it isn't GPL compatible, which means it's never
going in the Linux kernel, but as far as Debian-free goes, I think it's an
interesting corner case. Practically I'd be inclined to say "non-free, but
barely". The major issue that raises itself to me is: if the licence is
completely free, then someone is free to de-obfuscate the code and publish a
fully documented and workable version. I would imagine that "[satisfying]
the needs of commerce" is not compatible with that goal, so I would imagine
that the licence probably prohibits that in some way or another.
Who wrote this announcement, BTW? "I hope this form of private code
distribution will become a real alternative to object form". I certainly
don't. I want the freely modifiable source, dammit. Obfuscated source just
lets people say "well, you've got the source code to compile, why aren't you
happy?".
Sheesh. "it becomes closer to open source projects". Yeah, but not free
software. May as well have some "shared source" and get it over with.
- Matt
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