Re: Mobile, Web and Security

On Friday, October 18, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote:
> Le vendredi 18 octobre 2013 à 10:04 +0200, Tobie Langel a écrit :

> In fact, I think both of you guys have worked with proprietary code
> projects :), and I doubt that the fact that this code is protected by
> copyright and patent laws has been sufficient to make that code be
> publicly available.

Err… First of all, I don't think you've ever heard either of our companies asking for (or implementing) any kind of mechanism to hide src code.

Secondly, the reason Facebook doesn't make its code available is just that doing so properly would be complex and time consuming and has a lot less value than releasing specific open-source projects which _actually_ benefit the community. There are no security or code protection concerns here. Actually, security-wise, FB considers that an attacker has access to the full source code; which I believe is something you'll see as a recurring pattern in security conscious organizations.

Frankly, although the lack of code protection capabilities of the platform might actually be an deterrent for a small subset of players with clueless management, solving that problem would be very complex, highly controversial (that's EME for ALL WEB CONTENT) and would only cater for the needs of a very small minority. We'd be truly misguided if we considered this as a priority.

--tobie

Received on Friday, 18 October 2013 08:54:18 UTC