Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #195

Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #195 — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:04:44 GMT

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re: Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Anders Borum — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:50:57 GMT

Great post; also looking forward to the forthcoming series Eric.

re: Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Erik — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:31:37 GMT

Ooh, you're mean, hiding that little snippet at the end there... *glower*

Blog Carnival #8

IHateSpaghetti {code} — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:03:07 GMT

Unit testing Udi Dahan wrote a post about unit testing - Unit Testing for Developers and Managers Architecture

re: Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Ian Marteens — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:04:13 GMT

There could be an even simpler technique for preventing third-party derivation: the sixth visibility level supported by the CLR (and by some languages as Oxygen). The CLR supports both "family or assembly" (this is C#'s "protected internal") and "family AND assembly", not supported by C#.

Ok: not all virtual methods are protected, but protected ones could be marked "protected and internal", so they could only be overridden from inside the defining assembly.

re: Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Joe Mele — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:04:31 GMT

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the post. I have similar problem. I want to distribute a SDK that only *licensed* developers can extend.

Do you have any suggestions?

Joe Mele

re: Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Eric Lippert — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:21:04 GMT

Sure. First, get a lawyer. Have the lawyer write a EULA. Ship your SDK with a EULA that specifies that the classes may not be extended without license. Then have your lawyer sue the pants off anyone who violates your EULA.

I would characterize this as a human relations problem, not a technical problem.

re: Preventing third-party derivation, part two

Joe Mele — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:45:28 GMT

lol

Is that your approach to all software licensing? :)

I am working on a solution using SoftAnchor from uniloc. Just looking for another perspective/ideas.

thanks

Joe Mele