Wanted
2011-02-18 01:33:44
As many of you may well know, before free trade was removed, there was a lot of unauthorized distributing of SCAR going around, usually involving someone selling it to someone even though it was free at the time. Now, if SCAR had been open sourced during that time, well the chaos as any of you could well imagine if anyone of them had access to the source code during those times would of been irreparable.
Now that free trade is back, and simba is open source. A lot of bad people on the internet are beginning to notice the real life implications and entrepreneurship runescape cheating and underground offers to people. We've already seen one developer break his trust bond, things are only going to get worse as more and more people get involved in the scene again like the old days.
My question is, that with all this happening, what is going to protect simba from people abusing the source i.e. redistributing, selling, editing the source without permission for potentially malicious purposes. There are many possibilities, and possibilities that will probably not be realized until something new bad happens.
It's something to think about.
TomTuff
2011-02-18 01:44:49
As far as I know: not a whole lot. What we can do is make our site popular. If Simba were to be well known to be associated with villavu.com, people (the semi-intelligent ones at least) would be aware that it would be suspicious to get a special version of Simba from an unknown person. Also, if people knew about our site, they would know we don't advocate script selling and so they could probably come here to get a non-malicious version of the same script.
Hobbit
2011-02-18 01:48:03
Makes a build in code validator like a checksum system or something and hide/obfuse it?
Harry
2011-02-18 01:52:29
They took 'er codes!
It really doesn't matter I think; open source software is designed to be changed and given full control to the end user. We can only hope that the end user makes the right decision.
Nava2
2011-02-18 01:54:49
The big thing is that one *must* distribute the source if they plan to distribute the binaries. ;)
Yay for GPL.
mastaraymond
2011-02-18 07:18:31
Why would we want people to prevent from doing harm to other, non SRL, people?
That's like our government actively caring about theft in Poland?
weequ
2011-02-18 07:19:39
Interesting…
I guess there is pretty much nothing we can do. Maybe GPL could help a little bit?
cycrosism
2011-02-18 07:41:06
It's released under the GPL so anyone can do anything with the source code.
mastaraymond
2011-02-18 07:45:47
From: cycrosism
It's released under the GPL so anyone can do anything with the source code.
Well it's released under GPL so anyone can do anything with the source, as long as it is allowed by the license… Which is pretty strict on certain stuff.
cycrosism
2011-02-18 07:48:49
From: mastaraymond
Well it's released under GPL so anyone can do anything with the source, as long as it is allowed by the license… Which is pretty strict on certain stuff.
Well good luck making Bob in China follow those rules
mastaraymond
2011-02-18 07:55:51
From: cycrosism
Well good luck making Bob in China follow those rules
Bob in China would not edit Simba, he would rather make his own RSDeamon.
Boreas
2011-02-18 08:28:04
If a newb is asked to buy a program that should be free, there are a few possibilities;
they won't buy anything
they will buy the original closed source program
they will buy the original open source program
they will buy a modified open source program
Source being available or not will not change the abuse potential. The only thing to do is make sure that everyone that hears about Simba, also hears about the right place to get it. Or free name it to FreeSimba, OpenSimba, I guess, because I assume nobody would fall for buying openoffice/libreoffice.
Markus
2011-02-18 09:48:27
To answer your question: nothing will protect us.
But Hey321 and MoB got plenty of cash without hacking SCAR and you could just repack SCAR and then add some malicious code to it.
GPL sounds nice but it won't matter a bit as none of us has the funds to actively prosecute the people breaking it.
Wizzup?
2011-02-18 12:49:45
Well, isn't that a given? It doesn't really matter though, this happens everywhere. Not just with open source programs.
Unless you are telling me the only torrents you virus scan are the ones that are open source programs? It's very doable to do the same to nazi (closed source) programs. So point is not related to open source.