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May 23, 2003
Culture starts at the top...
In business, we say that a companies culture starts at the top. If the top of the company is greedy and dishonest, then thats how the company will act... even the employees that have never met 'the top'. This is true of most cultures be it government or social. There are software community cultures as well. Like the Open Source community, the Mac community and of course the Windows community. What made me think of this?I went to the Windows edition of Version Tracker where they list when any piece of Windows software is released or updated. I couldn't help but notice these on the main page of recent updates. HTML Guard, East-Tec Eraser 2003 4.0, Spy Guardian Pro 2.02 , and @WinSpy 2.0. Except for the first one, they are all security programs of different types. Certainly, the Mac and Unix community have applications like this. However, what caught my eye was how many there were in the recent updates at any given time. Looking at the list above, it reflects two aspects of the community. Windows is inherently insecure by itself and requires 3rd party tools to attempt to shore things up. Secondly, the windows community of software developers has a different set of ideals concerning software etiquette and value. I'll explain.
The first app HTML Guard tries to prevent people from Viewing Source on a page of your website and copying that source, thereby protecting your IP (intellectual property). I doubt a program like this exists for the Mac. Why? Firstly, Mac and Linux people (for the most part) don't believe in that method of security. We call it Security through Obscurity. Try and hide the details so they can't get them or find a weakness. Secondly, the idea that you'd try and stop people from 'copying' the source code to your website is a foreign concept to Mac and Linux users. First of all, its impossible. Secondly something has been posted to your 'public' website, its out there. People can naturally copy, paste, republish and do whatever they want. If they republish it against your wishes, its up to you to find them and stop them. You can't prevent them from copying it. Back to the security through obscurity part, for the most part people who'd use this tool are trying to prevent people from stealing some bit of script like javascript, dhtml or css code. The idea that some little snippit of javascript published publicly on some web page being intellectual property is also a foreign concept to 'us'.
Then there's the spyware protection tools. Spyware is an application which was installed, usually without your knowledge or against your will, by a piece of software you CHOSE to install. These spyware programs do various things from report back to their source information about you or force you to see ads. This is not a virus or trojan, its a piece of software that the windows community sees as valid. To the other software communities, spyware, like SPAM, should be illegal.
My point? In a community who's 'top' lobbies for the rights of those who send unsolicited email, and tries to protect its software by hiding the details from everyone, the prevalence of software such as those above are less of a surprise.
END RANT
Posted by wonko at May 23, 2003 04:16 PM
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Comments
I could not agree with you more.
Posted by: obigabu at May 24, 2003 09:18 AM
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