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.

: In many ways you can see Java *precisely* as a means of protecting
: intellectual property and aiding software hoarding. Suppose you want
: to distribute a program that will run on all systems. In the past,
: the easiest, indeed the only really practical way, to do this was
: to distribute sources. Now with the universal availability of Java
: byte code interpretors, you can distribute JBC, and avoid distributing
: the source.

  Robert,

  I re-read the above paragraph, and appreciate the logic of your statement.
  Perhaps the JBC is sufficient protection for those who are ordinary users.
  My concern is for those who specialize in purloining industrial secrets.

  Will JBC be secure enough to prevent someone from using it to reverse
  engineer my software product?

  Richard Riehle
-- 

richard@adaworks.com
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