On C/C++ undefined behaviours

[Nick Sabalausky]

"SK" <sk at metrokings.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.447.1282372871.13841.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 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.

Oh right, I won't deny any of that. And that sort of situation can, 
unfortunately, create a faulty-but-real need to supply such things. You 
can't educate an MBA - but you can fleece them ;)