Re: Ada News Brief - 96-05-24.txt [1/1]

[adaworks@netcom.com (AdaWorks)]

Robert Dewar (dewar@cs.nyu.edu) wrote:
: Richard Riehle (rriehle@nunic.nu.edu) wrote:

: >   Java's democratic nature is a blessing for open exhange of ideas. It
: >   would not lend itself easily to the protection of ideas.  When we want
: >   to minimize the risk of sacrificing our intellectual property through
: >   too easy public access, nothing does the job as well as Ada.


: That's a very strange viewpoint. Of course we are not talking languages
: here, as someone has pointed out, but rather typical environments.

  [snip, snip, snip ]

: byte code interpretors, you can distribute JBC, and avoid distributing
: the source.

  Perhaps my observation can be summed up in terms of the ease of
  reverse engineering. It seems to me easier to reverse engineer
  "bytecode" than pure executable code.  Perhaps not. But this is
  criticism I have seem raised in the computing press, including
  Software Magazine.

: THe discussion about free vs proprietary software is of course one that
: continues, and is not strictly relevant to this discussion, but claiming
: that Java is a blow in the direction of freedom is truly ironic!

  I am not complaining about free versus proprietary software. I applaud
  the availability of free software, especially products such as GNAT.
  However, I do have concerns for those commercial products in which there 
  is a substantial investment and which need to be protected as licensed,
  rather than "free."   The security associated with Java is a legitmate
  question.  

: All in all, the quote from Richard is quite bizarre. Even with a friendly
: interpretation, I can't make any sense out of it at all.

  Robert, I appreciate your effort at a friendly interpretation. And that 
  is not intended as sarcasm.

: Ada is a completely
: open language. It has an international standard and NO ONE can lay claim to
: any intellectual property rights in Ada itself. You can of course write
: proprietary programs in Ada, but that is true of any language.

  The issue is not the propietary nature of the language.  It is, rather,
  the security of the final product deployed in that language.  I am not
  alone in my suspicion that Java and its associated bytecode may be
  vulnerable to a variety of compromises. A software product, created
  in Ada, would probably be less at jeopardy after deployment.

  I am not denigrating the virtues of Java.  It will have, already has,
  an important place in the development of open applications. I am
  suggesting that it is the very openess of those applications which
  may put them at greater risk.

  It would be a great comfort if I could be sure I was completely 
  wrong about this.  

  As to the openess of Ada. That is a different issue. The language
  source code is pretty consistently portable.  The executables rarely
  are. The complexity of a deployed Ada program would present a formidable
  challenge to anyone who wanted to reverse-engineer it.  What is a virtue
  for Ada, is not a virtue for Java.  

  Richard Riehle
-- 

richard@adaworks.com
AdaWorks Software Engineering
Suite 27
2555 Park Boulevard
Palo Alto, CA 94306
(415) 328-1815
FAX  328-1112