Well this is the first topic I’ve seen that’s been reopened after it was locked, hopefully it won’t get locked again due to people taking it too far.

I am looking forward to reading the reviews, if it does what is described without any violation to privacy or license then I'd be all for it.... if it works.

Through the years there have been any products "announced" that have never made it to market. It's an ambitious idea - let's see how it develops. Considering it has not entered alpha testing yet it will be a little while I suspect.

Vic

I'm also surprised to see this reopened. Anyway, here are my thoughts.

To all the devs getting worried and talking about EULAs. If you're a software dev, you're surely aware of DIFFs. You can download WinMerge right now and compare files/folders between different states and see exactly what's changed. it's extremely useful. It's not illegal and it's not unethical. It's no different to what this 'forensics' application is going to do. It's just more flight sim focused. 

In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if a couple of devs are worried that end users will find things in their software that were used in 'other places'...

 

@solentflyer This thread was started in a bit of an underhanded manner. To pretend you were someone who just came across the software rather than the developer was not so cool. I get you were trying to generate interest but there are better ways.

Still, it sounds interesting. I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Seeing as that lately I've encountered a growing number of add-ons that silently changed other aspects of my installation, leading to frustrating searches for the reason, I am looking forward to this!

Me tooooo

 

On 11/27/2017 at 9:32 AM, simbol said:

That violates my EULA and terms and conditions that the users has agreed before installing my tools.

If you violate my EULA I asure you will receive a letter from my solicitors..

Best Regards,
Simbol

 

Because you don't want end users to see changes YOUR software is making to THEIR files (cfg files and the like)? Sounds like to me the software is doing nothing but tracking changes to cfg files, etc... Not decompliling YOUR files. You know how many developers change stuff in someones finely tuned P3D.cfg with nary a word said about it until that poor sod starts seeing weird behavior in their sim and then has to go investigate why something is happening only to see for example a developer automatically increased their max texture size to 4096 from 2048? That's happened to me many times. This software is probably born from this type of nonsense some developers do.

1 hour ago, B777ER said:

Because you don't want end users to see changes YOUR software is making to THEIR files (cfg files and the like)? Sounds like to me the software is doing nothing but tracking changes to cfg files, etc... Not decompliling YOUR files. You know how many developers change stuff in someones finely tuned P3D.cfg with nary a word said about it until that poor sod starts seeing weird behavior in their sim and then has to go investigate why something is happening only to see for example a developer automatically increased their max texture size to 4096 from 2048? That's happened to me many times. This software is probably born from this type of nonsense some developers do.

Thanks for your input, as stated before I have no problems with any tool reporting the changes I do to PD3 configuration files, that includes scenaries.cfg, pd3.cfg, addon.xml, Aircraft.cfg files, etc., any of my users are more than welcome to ask me all information they want about my products and I am more than happy to give them the information they need as I do all the time via email.

Also if you follow me on this forums you will notice the amount of time I give and dedicate to help members with problems in relation to any issues they might have with their simulators, I do this because I enjoy helping people and I know how difficult is for many users to find what is wrong with their simulators, so your statement that I want to hide things from my users is just not true, on the contrary I offer my help free of charge to anybody that ask me just for the joy to know that I will make someone happy with their simulation experience, this is my nature as I love this hobby very much.

The issue I have with this tool is that it will track changes (as I currently understand from the developer comments) to files that belongs my own Add-on, these are effects, SQL databases and other files that are located outside of the PD3 directory and that do not touch LM configuration files as they sole purpose is to allow my Add-on to perform what it is designed to do, I hope you can see the difference and why I disagree with this approach.

Best Regards,
Simbol

Glad they are leaving this open as this is a good example of an open, civil debate.

What I don't understand is why would I want this?  Is there a real world flightsim example where this would help me?

As long as it stays civil it is an interesting topic. My personal take on it - I can see *some* value but I already do myself what the program expects to do. Again personally, I am wary of any program that attempts to do too much. Better to be good an one or two things than mediocre at many.

MANY of the current crop of popular addons make modifications to files. MOST of them provide a means to back up said files and restore them. "Knowing exactly" what changes were made to a specific file is of no real benefit except out of curiosity. If someone develops an proprietary algorithm for a product and this program reveals it - IANAL but it could get interesting.

I believe that notifying the user to backup xyz folder as my program changes files in that folder is all that is necessary. How and what modifications I make are my sole property. If you do not want any of your files modified, don't buy my product. (if I had one)

Vic

Surely the tool will track changes to configuration files only, and AFAIK, a configuration file is not a propietary piece of software.  It's a file that makes changes to a proprietary piece of software. (The recent debate re PTA and ENVSHADE relates here).  I cannot believe for one moment that the proposed new tool here will have the ability to decompile or in any other way 'hack' DLL files and such, revealing their content (and such propietary software). 

Surely it's just tracking config changes to the sim?  As such Simbol, unless your software consists of solely configuration changes to existing Lockheed Martin propietary software, I doubt this proposed tool would have the ability to reverse engineer or other reveal true code.  Again, the PTA / Envshade situation is relevent to this.  Matt considered the changes that PTA makes to LM's shaders, propietary.  TOGA felt they weren't and that the Shaders themselves were the propietary property - not config changes to them made by other software.

To suggest that this new proposed tool can reverse engineer and reveal propietary code is a little like suggesting it can hack into and 'reveal' the source code of P3Dv4.    If it could truly reveal true code changes, why couldn't it also reveal all inherent code changes and content in P3Dv4 itself.

TL:DR - I don't think software developers have anything to worry about, regarding their propietary content being 'revealed'.

If I can, I would like to bring a little side-experience to this thread with the knowledge that everyone, particularly our average users, might not understand this.

First, beyond the initial inquiry, I don't think this conversation belongs in a public venue. There is simply too much that isn't understood by average users and information can be taken out of context or otherwise inaccurately construed.  With that, I would encourage a private, developer to developer discussion.

Now, this is an area where my background as a technical program manager helps me to understand the mattes at hand.  I spent a lot of years working with hardware and software developers working on the same or similar projects and dealing with and moderating intellectual property rights and proprietary information.  Legal stuff that would likely bore the pants off the majority of our community - but it's an area where I do have some rather hardcore experience.

I can weigh in very quickly and decisively on this matter by saying that Simbol is correct at least US Federal Law is concerned. No point in debating the matter with me, it's something for discussion with an attorney/solicitor, and I am not one. But in my work I had teams of lawyers to rely on, and I have many, many years working directly with precisely this type of thing.

Now that said, there is almost always room to work out an arrangement and I see plenty of opportunity here to do so. Communicating via a forum is almost always the worst possible venue and as an old business partner of mine once explained to me, "nothing is more misconstrued than the written word".

Competition exists in several areas of the flight sim world, and developers invest a great deal to bring a product to market. Developers have every right to be concerned about their trade secrets. It is a terrible thing for our community to loose talented developers who value and respect their customers, and is something which we as a community should always be concerned about.

 

As always, I wish everyone my best.

 

23 minutes ago, DaveCT2003 said:

First, beyond the initial inquiry, I don't think this conversation belongs in a public venue. There is simply too much that isn't understood by average users and information can be taken out of context or otherwise inaccurately construed.  With that, I would encourage a private, developer to developer discussion

“Democracy dies in darkness”.

10 minutes ago, Milton Waddams said:

“Democracy dies in darkness”.

Agreed!  But business is about as far from democracy as one can get.

 

3 minutes ago, DaveCT2003 said:

Agreed!  But business is about as far from democracy as one can get.

 

Ain’t that the truth!