.net = the dawn of universal open-source?

From: Eric Grange (egrange_at_glscene.org)
Date: 10/27/03 

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 07:10:13 +0100

I hadn't checked the state of .net decompilers recently, and made a quick
sweep and found this one among others:

        http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/

        (decompiles to C#, VB... and Delphi!!!)

That raises an interesting "feature" of .net: every .net "binary" is quite
similar to a zip file containing the full source of the application
(comments are lost, but on the other hand, you get a nice code navigator
Winzip doesn't have).
Interesting side-effect is that should .net succeed, it means universal
open-source, and thus M$ becoming an effective facilitator of open-source!

Now, two questions:
- will DelphiDotNet itself be a .net "binary"? I've always wanted to look
   at all the code :) -- and if it's not, or if parts are not, then that's
   a clear incentive to stay the hell away from it for all commercial code.
- I don't see any kind of protection or obfuscation that could reliably be
   implemented for .net "binaries" given the fact they have to be able to run
   on an isolated machine. But has Borland some plans?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong supporter of open-source in many situations,
but on the other hand, I don't want to see competitors being able to pluck all
the nice bits from commercial apps of my company into theirs.
Even if it's illegal, catching them red-handed would be next to impossible
if they use classic compilation for their app, and don't copy-paste the GUI
or any painfully obvious stuff in a highly visible parts of their application
(if only because it would amount to a lot of reverse engineering, which is
neither cheap nor legal).
On the other hand, .net "binaries" can be made human-readable with applications
already widely available, barely larger than an enhanced notepad clone, and that
produce an output even joe programmer can have in its language of choice...

Eric

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