Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 13:12 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report) by k8to
Parent article: Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Deliberate obfuscation occurs even in cases where no NDA is involved: see the vcg graphing tool, for instance (de-obfuscated a few years ago).

Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 14:08 UTC (Wed) by jg (guest, #17537) [Link] (3 responses)

There are some claims, which I judge are more likely correct than not in the case of the NVidia driver, that the author of that driver literally programs that way.

He should enter the obfuscated C contest.

Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 15:59 UTC (Wed) by dberkholz (guest, #23346) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm willing to believe that ... but how about looking back in the XFree86 history at when the driver wasn't obfuscated, and at this CHANGELOG entry:

XFree86 3.3.3 (18 November 1998)
1244. Obfuscate the NVIDIA sources by NVIDIA's request.

Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 11, 2006 21:44 UTC (Wed) by dberkholz (guest, #23346) [Link] (1 responses)

And if you want to see obfuscation at it's finest, take a look at the actual code.

Making sense of the One Laptop Per Child proprietary software row (Jem Report)

Posted Oct 16, 2006 22:16 UTC (Mon) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

And if you want to see obfuscation at it's finest, take a look at the actual code.

And for even more amusement, do a diff against the previous version for any of the files in question. ;-)

Greg