On C/C++ undefined behaviours

[SK]

Hi Nick,

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:37 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>
> I'm curious what you have to say about #1. But I consider #2 to be a very
> poor reason because:
>
> - There's always reverse engineering.
> - There's always obfuscation.
> - IL may even provide better reverse-engineering results than machine code,
> depending on the IL.
> - All the companies sinking time and money into JS and PHP middleware don't
> seem to have a problem with handing out their source.
> - If someone's gonna steal a product and rebrand it as their own, they don't
> usually need the source, and having it would probably only be of fairly
> small help, if any.
> - As a customer, the idea of spending money on a product that I can't
> service myself if/when the company goes under or loses interest makes me
> nervous. Providing their source would given them a competetive advantage.
> - Even though providing source gets in the way of effective DRM (as if there
> even were such a thing), DRM itself gets in the way of sales.
> - Distributing in source form makes certain things possible that wouldn't
> otherwise be, like virtual template functions (in theory, even if not in
> actual D practice).
>

Yes, yes and yes - especially about not needing source to be a pirate.
 But your perspective is not shared by many big companies shipping
software I care about.  The open source movement has even turned up
the contrast in this regard for closed source companies.  Without
conducting a thorough Fortune 500 survey, I will assert that shipping
source is an emotionally burdened action at the management level, and
this roadblock is avoided by "simply" running code through front end
compilation.  So, just do that and move on the to next problem.