Or another analogy: if someone posts a beautiful render on CGTalk, should the artist share his scene and assets?
yes. if anyone shows the stuff on technical forum where people are looking for ideas he/she has to explain how it was done. otherwise the person was posting in the wrong place.
What makes you think .net is opensource ? While i am not an expert for .net nor for licenses i don’t think dotNet itself is opensource. If it was then why would anyone do an opensource implementation of .net (Mono) ?
Regards,
Thorsten
I’d like to get the .NET sourcecode please I know you get get much of it using tools like Reflector, but it is not by itself open source.
Aha ok, so your point is that script releases should not be posted in this section, but in the Autodesk 3dsmax section instead? I would agree with you on that
I agree that it doesn’t make sense to post encrypted code in the maxscript forum here, because it’s a place where scripters exchange knowledge.
It’s not a place for end-users, looking for tools. At least I think so.
I will reply in Matan’s name as I was the one who insisted on getting it encrypted in the first place.
All of the points against releasing it free were already discussed, we wanted to get some of the pipeline tools out for the public to use.
It’s been created by the studio and for the studio and we tend to use parts of the framework in them and as a result decided not to send them as an open script.
The next tool that we are releasing, has it’s core encrypted but it is built with plugin scripts that can extend it and these are open for you to deconstruct.
We are not dealing with rocket science and if an individual wishes to get the code we can sort it out.
Cheers,
Yoni
so far as we’re talking about rights can i post decrypted somebody else’s free script posted on free forum with my comments and corrections?
i will never do it, but anyone else… why not?
perhaps your next challenge should be how to find a key for an encrypted script in minimal time and memory.
Something like that will only piss people off.
I posted a while back on the naivete of entrusting your crown jewels to MSE files. They arent secure at all. The usual failure of security through obscurity.
A better challenge would be to craft a solution that will execute mxs in a secure sandbox. Something like ExecuteMAXScriptScript, combined with public key crypto might make it more difficult to get to the plaintext of script.
That sort of system would have to open in the sense that it would need to be easy to evaluate and recompile on your own system, otherwise no one would bother to trust it.
The community involved in this forum is probably one of the best places to develop such a system so that it can be properly vetted. People can use it elsewhere to protect their trade secrets.
but if Im catching Denis sentiment: why bother? I much prefer the general tone of look at how Ive done it, not look at what Ive done around here.
But then of course I have to immediately contradict myself and say that, no, Im not going to tell anyone how to decrypt an .mse file.
.biddle
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d say that is breaking copyright laws unless the license of the code allowed you to do that
I’m a bit with Denis here. I never post my scripts as they are either to specific to our pipeline or I can and will not support it. So I don’t post much of tools.
I also almost never use 3rd party encrypted scripts on my distribution tools. I need to set some comments in the header of every max file, which cannot be done with encrypted files, plus if we come to rely on them and a developer just doesn’t update for a new release or whatever will break in the future, we have come dependent on a tool that just became useless. I wouldn’t want to be the one that has to fix that. And I just want to know if a tool phones home, I cannot allow that.
Only if an encrypted tool had a way to see the “public methods and parameters” so you could use it like a dll, I’d consider using it. If I trust the publisher.
So I also do agree that encrypting has some merits, but also by so much in terms of security, as has been proven in past threads, the encryption is not even that hard to break if you know what you’re doing (I obviously don’t, but there’s people on this forum that can), so some scriptkid with too much time on his hands can take your code, rewrap it and put it online for half price…
My personal philosophy is either release it as opensource and with some quoteware license, or keep it to myself. About copyright laws, most scripts don’t include a license anyway.
-Johan
From personal experience, I would normally post the unencrypted version on say Cgtalk or another 3d forum board, but if I were putting it on my portfolio, it might would be encrypted (forum boards = learning community, portfolio = showing things i’ve worked on).
98% of my scripts I write I can never show or post as they’re tied into our pipeline, but sometimes when I have spare time (hardly any, however), I’ll throw something together, especially if it’s fun, which I certainly wouldn’t mind posting, unencrypted on a forum board.
I remember a lot of time was saved once when working on some lighting prototypes in Max. No direct access to the Vertex Paint modifier was to be found, but Denis and a few other forum posters had a long thread about the various ways to accomplish it (though I’d still prefer the Vertex Paint functions to be more accessible! ), and of course I did give credit to Cgtalk :D.
At the end of the day, I don’t care if people post encrypted scripts, but normally if they are, I won’t use them, as I don’t know what they’re doing to my machine, and who knows, they could have a tower of globals being dumped into my Max session.
On another note, I think all of us would agree, that we’ve probably learned most from the effort that has been put into the Maxscript reference. If every other 3d app has a scripting/API reference like it, the world would be a better place.