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Re: releasing java for macintosh

On Thu, 24 May 2001, amos anderson wrote:

>
> 2) what kind of copyright protection/security should i use? this program is
> free of charge, but we still don't want someone else to take it, change it a
> bit and then sell it or anything! there are actually 2 issues here, what can i

As you say, there are two questions: what is legally possible? and
what is technically possible?
Regarding the first one, this depends on what you want. If you
simply copyright it and distribute it for free, you still own all the
rights to it. No one can legally modify it, or redistribute it in any way
except the ways you explicitly allow. If you put it under the GPL
(copyleft), then people CAN modify it, redistribute it, or even sell it.
However, their modified version will also have to be under the GPL, so
they won't be able to prevent other people from modifying it further,
giving it away for free, etc.
As far as what is *technically* possible, realize that a Java program
will always be hackable by someone who knows what they are doing. You
can, however, make it difficult for them by running your compiled classes
though an obfuscator. That is a program which replaces all your class
names, method names, etc. with meaningless strings. There are a number of
obfuscators available. I've used Retroguard, which is free and works
pretty well. (I don't have a URL handy, but just check your favorite
search engine.) There are lots of others.

> 3) for a release on macintosh, what should i use for installation software? i
> will use MRJAppBuilder to turn the jars into the application, i assume that is
> the best thing to do, right? this will probably only be about 2mb or so and
> only one file, it seems to me that using an installer has benefits that i am

If it's only one file, an installer is completely unnecessary. Just
distribute that file. This is by far the simplest (both for you and your
users) way, and also the most "Mac-like". You can use Stuffit to compress
that file if you want, but assuming you started with a compressed jar
file, that probably won't get you anything. (Remember - jar files are
really zip files, which is a reasonably well compressed format to begin
with.)

Peter

References: 
 >releasing java for macintosh (From: "amos anderson" <email@hidden>)



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