Re: symbol hiding

[Dan Timis]

On Friday, May 14, 2004, at 05:34 AM, [e-mail] 
wrote:
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 22:26:34 -0400
> From: Paul Davis 
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: symbol hiding
>
> for this reason, i personally wouldn't feel comfortable asking in a
> public forum how to go about doing this. your mileage may and probably
> does vary, of course.

My original question generated this new thread, which in turn became 
very technical.  But, I think that Paul's original posting was more of 
a philosophical or maybe even moral nature.

I'm not sure if there is a FAQ about the etiquette on this group, the 
kind of questions that can be asked, and the kind that cannot be asked. 
  I have nothing to hide.  Our company sells a piece a hardware that has 
an x86 mother board inside and runs Linux and wine.  It is a consumer 
appliance similar to TiVo in the sense that it does not look like a 
computer and the customer does not have access to the Linux shell, nor 
can he or she run other applications.  On top Linux we have a 
proprietary application that runs under wine (wine -- 
proprietary-application.exe.so).  Our application is not open source.

If questions relating to a commercial non open source product that uses 
wine heavily are not welcome on this list, I apologize and I will never 
ask these kinds of questions again.

Dan Timis
Muse Research, Inc.

symbol hiding

[Paul Davis]

> My original question generated this new thread, which in turn became 
> very technical.  But, I think that Paul's original posting was more of 
> a philosophical or maybe even moral nature.

[ ... ]
> If questions relating to a commercial non open source product that uses 
> wine heavily are not welcome on this list, I apologize and I will never 
> ask these kinds of questions again.

Dan - it was not my plan to silence such questions at all. I just
wanted to point out the, yes, moral issue that I saw. I think you
should feel free to continue to ask them. nobody has else has raised
anything related my concerns, so I think you are on safe ground in
terms of etiquette.

--p

symbol hiding

[Mike Hearn]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 16:02:20 -0700, Dan Timis wrote:
> If questions relating to a commercial non open source product that uses 
> wine heavily are not welcome on this list, I apologize and I will never 
> ask these kinds of questions again.

Given that 99.99999% of the software Wine is used to run is proprietary,
it'd be an odd forum if we didn't like to talk about it :)

I think Pauls point was that if what you are doing is so secret and so
proprietary that you're afraid symbol names will leak trade secrets you're
probably better off with some full blown code obfuscater/encryption system.

thanks -mike