Re: obfuscating the code?

houghi schreef:
amygdala wrote:
Why should software be free? And why would you want to call this greed?
What's wrong with just making a decent living? Why do you instantly
consider protecting your intellectual properties greed?

It is most of the time pure greed.
greed
n 1: excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more
material wealth) than one needs or deserves


Let's say you've put hard labour in developing an application for a
client. After the hard labour is done, client suddenly decides that they
can't pay you the wager anymore, because you are becoming too expensive
for them, and they want to move to a new contracter, to do the
maintenance from now on.

Let me get this straight.
1) I did a job I was asked to do an got money for that.
2) They do not want to do any more work
3) Because I do not work for them anymore, they do not pay me.

Sounds fair to me.

Agreed. Fair enough, yes.


The new contracter could thus have access to code you put hard labour
in. Consequently:

1) You've lost your client

Because I was too expensive.

From their point of view, yes. From my point of view I would say I
deliver quality that should be paid accordingly. You could argue that
the client could find this out for themselfs, by moving to a new
contracter that might not get the job done as well. But I don't think a
client, 'accusing' you of being overrating, would easily come back afterwards, when they find out the new contractor is not up to par with your work, do you?


2) You've given a potential competitor a freeby
a) They don't have to develop the expensive application no more

I was payed for that development. Or I at least asume I was payed for
that development. There should be two prices. One for development and
one for maintanence. Perhaps your strenght is in development and not in
maintenence.

Could be. The 'maintenence' also consists of expanding the application
though. But that's a bit beside the point.


b) They harvest from the seeds you planted which could have given you
a steady income for a while, but now has given your competitor a steady
income through 'simply' maintenaining the software.

The only way I could guarantee that income is by somehow forcing them to
be my customer. That by copyrighting and obfuscating the code. The reaon
I do that is so I can make more money. So even that I am more expensive
or somebody else is better in doing the job, I force you to pay me.
Somebody else would deserve that money, but I want it. That is greed.

Of course I can not 'force' a client to keep coming back to me. The
thing is, the client moaned about us being too expensive from the get
go. They don't seem to appreciate the extra quality that comes along
with it, taking into consideration what their earlier contractors did
for them. Maybe we haven't convinced them enough of this and we should be having a good conversation with them in the near future, where we emphasize on what added value we bring to the table. If that doesn't convince them so be it. But letting them run of with the source code of the application doesn't feel too comfortable though....

Maybe it is a bit greedy, I don't know.


Coincidently I am finding my self in a comparible situation at this
moment (as a sub contractor though). We are also concidering obfuscating
our code. The code is still hosted on our own servers at this moment,
but the client has asked us to move the application to their own server.
We presume they want to ditch us afterwards.

Then don't do business with them. If you can not trust one another, you
should NOT be doing business together.

I agree with this point about trust. But trust isn't a static entity,
is it? You could very well have a trustworthy relationship with your
customer or contracter for a while. But trust can be 'betrayed' (for
lack of a better or more subtle word, because of I can't think of one right now ;) during the relationship. Anyway, it is not so much lacking trust from out part. But lack of trust from their part, in that the money they pay isn't worth the spending.

But anyway getting rather of topic here. Concluding:

Maybe you could consider it to be a bit greedy. I don't know. I just like to ensure a steady income. Like any entrepreneur would.


I am on the other side where the
> company payed for closed source and that means zero flexibilaty on the
other side and we can't do anything about it. Well, we could ditch the
whole project and write off several hundred thousand and start all over.

houghi

.

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