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Progster -
Your response addressed DLL's and made good points about intellectual
property, but IMO you might have missed a point and been a little off
the larger target.
I think that the larger question is protection of AFL's. This is
something that Howard Bandy and I discussed with Tomasz at the
conference in Feb. I'm going to delve into it a little here because I
think that it is time to air it again, then I'll offer a quick point
about DLL's.
Many have AFL's (trading systems, AND utilities) that they would
release if they could protect them. There are two reasons for
protecting the source - one obvious and one not so obvious -
1. To charge for the code and for the intellectual property. The
market will decide if the price is reasonable or not.
2. To protect the source. Many times others will mod the source and
then tie up author's time with questions about how the original
software worked OR why the modified software doesn't work. This is a
real problem. I have released a fair amount of AB code in another
venue and can relate this problem firsthand.
My impression is that Tomasz is reluctant to incorporate AFL
protection for a couple of reasons. I won't try to speak for him, but
I think that one of his reasons is that he feels that protected code
that possibly had a charge would impede the sharing of code. To that
all that I can ask is - how much is not now being released because
this facility doesn't exist. Howard and I and others have tried to
emphasize this.
Now to DLL's. Certainly code can be placed in a DLL to hide it. It
is also fairly easy to protect it. It is just a pain and a
productivity hit to convert AFL to a DLL just to protect it. And in
the end, any protection can be broken by a determined hacker.
Protection tends to fall into two categories -
1. Wrappers for EXE's and DLL's that implement keyed protection for
existing binaries and require no changes. The protection may or may
not be machine unique. For example, ASPROTECT
2. Embedded protection calls that require changes to the app. Several
libraries available - some open such as ACTIVELOCK
Anyway, I'd be interested in others thoughts on this issue.
-- Bruce R
--- In amibroker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "progster01" <progster@xxx> wrote:
>
> The discussion so far on "Why so few?" DLLs seems pretty much
> on-target to me.
>
> I would add:
>
> Ability to program a non-trivial DLL is a marketable skill that takes
> a long time to develop.
>
> There are certainly a number of fine examples of free contribution to
> the AB community in the DLL area (e.g. RMath, for one).
>
> One can only feel gratitude and appreciation for such "above and
> beyond" contributions.
>
> However, capable DLL authors have the same 24/7/365 limitations as
> everyone else, and must confront a simple choice about how/where to
> spend their time and effort: getting paid, or not getting paid.
>
> Since DLL writing is (almost) platform agnostic, DLL writers in the
> trading area will have a tendency to code for platforms that provide
> built-in support for locking a DLL to a customer or software ID.
>
> I would predict that such "commercializing" integration features would
> result in a distinct increase in the number of commercial DLLs
> available for AB.
>
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