Protecting Source?

[bartbes]

You have all gone mad! Please stop this!

[Robin]

You have all gone mad! Please stop this!

I don't know exactly what you mean, but if you are referring to the increasingly far-fetched ideas to "protect the source", I agree. There is no way to do this 100% water-tight, and I am not convinced it would even be a good thing.

It was fun to imagine weird and over-the-top ways to keep people from knowing the source code, but they are neither water-tight, nor practically feasible.

[appleide]

Put the program in your server; Have a client send input to the server, which sends back display, animation, etc instructions over the net. The client simply draws the game on screen.

This ensures the source code doesn't leak. Packets hackers sniff only contains drawing code, and input keys and mouse coordinates.

[bartbes]

Well, indeed, but that leaves you with other problems, a central server must be ready to take the heavy load, and if players control their own servers.. there we go again.

[Robin]

Plus, the input could still be from non-human origin. For example, a bot that reacts slightly faster than normal humans...

[Sparx]

Besides it's extremly hard seting up an autoratative server communication while having no lags.