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were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software.were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software.Posted Dec 15, 2006 19:26 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)Parent article: Second Life and Open Source
> There the story might have ended, were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software.
This is non-sense. When people want to use a software for an illegal purpose they do not need it a license nor even the source. People have been patching closed binaries to change their behaviour since 30 years, and I am not mentioning reverse engineering what the piece of code do and rewrite it. This is just an attempt of security by lame obscurity.
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were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software. Posted Dec 15, 2006 23:48 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] You will agree that being a text edit followed by a./configure && make away from a modified binary is orders of magnitude easier than reverse-engineering a closed binary or cracking it to change its behavior. The audience for the first scenario increases accordingly.
were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software. Posted Dec 16, 2006 14:26 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] No, not realy.
Thousands of people can just as easily use the binaries he produced, either way it's just as simple for 99.995% of people that would end up using it.
It's why DMCA/DRM is pointless for protecting copyrighted data. Only one person needs to know how to break the data protections, then everybody else can have a copy of the data since it's possible to replicate digital data infinately.
were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software. Posted Dec 22, 2006 17:08 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] The article seems to be talking about the problem of people removing the disclaimer and putting in taunts. I'm not sure why that's a significant problem, but it is a problem that probably would not exist if not for the fact that CopyBot was free software (or maybe I should be more specific: usable-source-available software). To patch a binary to do that would be costly enough that it probably wouldn't have happened.
were it not for the fact that CopyBot was free software. Posted Dec 21, 2006 17:58 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] You clearly chose to ignore the part of the article which describes howthe modified version of CopyBot was repackaged, redistributed and even sold on Second Life itself. None of which would have even been legal with closed-source software (and hence, could have been stomped on with a quick C&D); with BSD-licensed software, it's not just legal, it's unstoppable.
Therefore, the original statement is not "non-sense" (incidentally, the
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