Re: Restrictware... But this is for help science, of course!

[Mark Holmquist]

On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 10:58:51AM +0200, Solal wrote:
> I found a dangerous thing, a new excuse for restrictware creators to
> restrict freedom :
> 
> "We have not outsourced the client for several reasons, relating to
> client reliability and other issues. However, we?ve come up with a
> compromise ? we have been developing a plug in architecture to allow
> people to write open source (sic) code that we can plug into our client."

Except that this isn't at all a new excuse; game developers have been
doing this, particularly in the Flash game community, for many years.
If you let people see and modify the client, the argument goes, then
people will be able to cheat.

Hilariously, people always find a way to cheat anyway, and you can see
high scores of "9999999999999" on most Flash game high score tables.

The general principle of "trust, but verify" should be pounded more
reliably into the brains of programmers, especially ones dealing with
distributed networks or server/client architectures :)

-- 
Mark Holmquist
Software Engineer, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur@member.fsf.org
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MHolmquist

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