NDA and source code

NDA and source code

Posted Jul 14, 2006 17:46 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285)
Parent article: French law affects copyright, DRM, Apple (Macworld UK)

I wonder about NDAs. Many programmers sign them, read the documentation, and produce compiled binary code. But binary code is not unreadable, merely difficult.

Is there really anything in an NDA that specifies how difficult the resulting program must be to read?

Go ahead and sign the NDA, then write the program as an easily decompiled Java class file. Or a Perl script. A C program with very long and descriptive variable names and full debug info "accidentally" included.

If the NDA contract can sue for not sufficiently obfuscating the code, then where are the limits? If Java class files with verbose symbol names violate the NDA, then why not compiled binaries that didn't bother to use an encrypted jump table with self-modifying call trampolines?

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