[time-nuts] Brooks Shera

[David Kirkby]

On 21 December 2012 18:11, Chris Albertson <albertson.chris at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think whatthis says is that if you've worked hard to make a design
> available to others and you don't intend to sell it commercially,
> PUBLISH the details, the design files and the source code.   Yes I
> kknow it is never "good enough" for others to see.  But in reality it
> is likely better than what 99.9%  of others can do.

I agree if you don't want to sell it, then make it public, even if it
is not "finished"

That said, some of the ****  code that people release, and gets
circulated annoys me.  Take a look at this unix shell script,

http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/kirkby/bad-code/sympow-1.018.1.p7/src/Configure

or the C code in the same directory

http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/kirkby/bad-code/sympow-1.018.1.p7/src/


But another issue is that sometimes people DO want to make money from
their code. In that case, they want to keep it secret (as Bruce did).
But I supect in many cases they would probably agree to it being made
public in the event of their death or them becoming incapacitated.
Code like Bruch wrote is unlikely to be commerically useful to his
family, so he might as well make it public. But it may be too late.

I wonder if there is a technical solution to this. You encrypt your
secret source code, giving the encrypted code to anyone that wants it.
You give 3 people you trust part of the decryption key. Any two parts
are sufficient to decrypt the code. Would something like that be
acceptable to individuals that make money from code, but don't
realistically believe it will survice commerically without them.


Dave