

Should I be concerned about putting my code on a 3rd party server? - gatorade


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dfranke
No. There are basically two parts to your code that you want to protect: the
algorithms and the copyright. If your hosting provider's terms of service are
anything resembling sane, then keeping your code on their site isn't doing
anything to compromise the copyright, and anyone willing to steal your code
outright in manner that violates the copyright isn't your competition.

Most applications don't use or require any algorithms sufficiently innovative
to be worth protecting. If you're in the minority, then you should be a lot
more concerned about your former employees than your hosting provider. It
might be worth getting a patent, but really the odds of having your ideas
stolen by your hosting provider and then sold to competition and having this
result in a meaningful loss to your company are probably orders of magnitude
smaller than your odds of getting struck by lightning.

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jsjenkins168
Encrypt it. There are lots of open source programs that can do that for you.
Even if they get a hold of the files they will be meaningless without your
private key.

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staunch
If he's talking about interpreted server-side code that's not very realistic.
The third party has total physical access to the machine. It's pretty hard to
have the code run and remain encrypted at all times -- impossible in most
cases. The closest real thing you can do is obfuscate your code, which can
make things painful for you as well.

If you're a US company and the third party is as well I'd just rely on
copyright law for protection. If they're a foreign company it's more
difficult.

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especkman
Concerned why? Are you concerned about someone stealing your proprietary code?

Or are you worried because you have made unreleased proprietary modifications
to GPLed code and you are worried that running your modified version on
another parties servers might be considered "distribution," and give the host
the option of distributing it to other parties?

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tuukkah
Don't worry, they probably couldn't understand the code anyway even if their
ethics lapsed.

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blored
Make sure to obfuscate your Javascript/CSS files.

