[Openmcl-devel] CCL images, consumer apps, and piracy

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 8 Apr 2011, at 19:36, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> Let's say I write a commercial app for a consumer audience, such as a
> game.  Aside from a few system .dlls accessed by CFFI, it is written
> entirely in CL.  I save-application with prepend-kernel to create a
> standalone .exe.  What's to stop some hacker from extracting my Lisp
> image from the standalone .exe, loading it with a CCL kernel of their
> choosing, and then using my code in any way they like?  It seems like
> not only could they pirate my game, they could mod it in any way they
> like, and easily distribute their own derivative works.  If there's
> something about the internals of a CCL image that would make this
> difficult, I would be grateful for an explanation.  Or, if it's easy
> by default but can be made difficult, I'd welcome that too.

I don't see that this is particularly easier for CCL than it is for any other language, is it?  What they'd get would presumably be a bunch of object code & dumped data from your system, from which they could perhaps extract function names &c, and may be, if they have a lot of time, put them together to do something else.  They can do that for C if they want to, as well.