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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Because it makes it even harder for users to take apart websites and understand them.

If it ends up executing IL, then tools like Reflector will probably make it easier to read and explore the code than minified JS

I’m sorry, but have you actually written tools to take apart obfuscated and minified JS vs. webasm?

I’ve actually done that to research and break some systems, and webasm is an order of magnitude worse than JS.

My understanding was that, at least for this example, is that the DNA runtime is loading raw IL, not webasm, and the interesting site specific stuff will be in IL. I do not doubt what you're saying about webasm.

That’s until someone, like Microsoft, makes a serious version of this, and integrates automated obfuscation.

What's bad about that? The owners have every right to not disclose their source code.

But why do we, as society, grant them that right?

I mean, this is the reason why patents were invented originally: You publish the way your technology works, in return, after a short term, everyone can use it, which improves innovation.

Yet, nowadays, a lot more is done via trade secrets.

It would be awesome if we could get that innovation back that we’ve lost.

Because "we as a society" have no business telling other people what to do with their things as long as they don't hurt others.

For some people the alternative to closed source isn't open source, it's either "not publicly published" or "not developed at all", which actually slows development down.

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