Tunes and security

Francois-Rene Rideau rideau@nef.ens.fr
Sat, 7 Dec 1996 09:19:45 +0100 (MET)


Dear Hamdani,

> 	1. You cannot patent algorithm / method.
>            If you find a better method you must seek
>            protection under "COMPANY'S SECRET" law.
>            This involve lots of lawyers and I do not
>            think the judge / jurry know about infringement.
Ok. Glad to know it.

>            However you can patent a program (even source).
>            If your competitor read the source and modify it,
>            you cannot easily sue him. Slight differences
>            (loop, path, variable, etc) will nullified your
>            claims.
Yeah. The same holds with books and music scores.
But happily, that doesn't prevent book authors to publish their works!!!
   My opinion is that if it's so easy to copy current software,
it's because these software are really lame,
not containing much ideas at all.
If Tunes is such that software can accumulate in a large number of modules,
then good software will be made of many many modules,
and to escape patent suits,
one should have to non-trivially modify all these modules
which is much more difficult.

>         2. The achiles heel of codes higher than native is
>            that it is easier to reverse engineer. Interpreted
>            codes are easier to break than compiled one.
>            I guess your codes will be higher than interpreted one???
Yes, but they need not be published,
if a software warrant/optimizer/mixer business is used.

>         3. What about the performance / time penalty for
>            converting your codes into native machine code?
>            IMO it will slow down the apps. significantly.
>
The TAOS approach shows that this is not the case.
Moreover, software mixers as well as local hosts
would cache the compiled versions of commonly asked software
for commonly asked platforms,
so that compiling needs not be done everytime.
After all, software warranting/mixing might be a valuable business!

>         4. The individual is embedded on the packaging,
>            not on the mask. IMO it will be possible soon.
That'll be good. But this doesn't solve security problems
during communication between hosts...

== Fare' -- rideau@ens.fr -- Franc,ois-Rene' Rideau -- DDa(.ng-Vu~ Ba^n ==
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