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The argument that vendors don't make any effort to prevent disassembly means that they don't care about piracy is flawed; the costs associated with additional p
by tylermenezes 15y ago
The argument that vendors don't make any effort to prevent disassembly means that they don't care about piracy is flawed; the costs associated with additional protection may just not be worth it.
Adobe, for example, used to go to great lengths to prevent people from cracking their software. In the end, though, a crack still came out within a few weeks. Was it really worth months of highly-paid-developer-time to slow down piracy for maybe a month at best? (Evidently not, since CS5 and above can be disabled by adding a line to your HOSTS file.)
Even as an individual who's sold software in the past, it's usually not worth it. I don't have the time myself, and commercial software which does this costs hundreds to thousands of dollars. I may not be happy if people pirate my software (I'm actually fine with it), but it's not worth the cost to prevent it.
That said, I found the article extremely interesting!
- hannibalhorn 15y agoCouldn't agree more. You also lose valuable debugging information, like crash reports, that aren't as useful when you've applied obfuscation techniques. You may very well wind up with a buggier product, and thus a worse experience for your actual customers.
- tsewlliw 15y agoFor my time spent, I'd rather improve debugability over most any other aspect of quality in software. I dream of never needing to get something reproduced because when something goes wrong there is a real useful data and execution trace, no matter whether the bug manifested as a crash or incorrect behavior. IMO the compilation/execution strategy of chicken scheme is a big step towards enabling this.
- wladimir 15y agoExactly. Buggy and slow software is a much larger, worse issue than piracy, which directly affects your paying customers. IMO good software has the same properties as good hardware: the internals accessible to diagnose and solve problems. Sure, people may "steal" your code, but then again, if your business model relies on keeping code secret instead of being helpful to customers, you have already lost. You're not some kind of priest protecting your superior, holy code from lesser minds. Edit: Also, code obfuscation says "I don't trust you, customer!" if nothing else.