So, give your proprietary software both network access and access to all my source code?
I have very few complaints about the Jedi autocomplete library, which is neither proprietary nor requires network access.
I welcome innovation in dev tools, but I wish you had found a monetization strategy that didn't require us to trust you so completely.
The private keys used to sign releases are kept offline and would not be available to an attacker even if they compromised my online accounts.
Finally, TabNine will work correctly if you deny it network access (say, by blacklisting update.tabnine.com).
> TabNine makes web requests only for the purposes of downloading updates and validating registration keys.
Also, AFAIK most understandings of MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0 licenses require you to acknowledge the copyright holders of the source code you compile into your binary, even if the licenses permit binary distribution. I can't find your "Copyright (c) 2018 Tokio Contributors" or "Copyright (c) 2014 The Rust Project Developers" that I'd expect based on `strings TabNine | grep github`. Maybe you've got a lawyer that suggests otherwise? Your plea of "trust me, I have good hygiene" carries less weight when I have to `strings` your stuff to know what shoulders of which giants you're standing on.
Can't you make the same complaint about any auto-update functionality in any software? Even if it's BSD licensed, you're still counting on whomever has authority to push an update to not push malicious code.
This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that his code is proprietary nor his monetisation strategy, so why are you singling him out for those?
DRM/monetisation - the product as of my comment didn't seem to acknowledge the open source works compiled into the binary, and I didn't think that was a good look for someone with the authority to push out malicious code.
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
It's up to a court to decide what "copies or substantial portions of the Software" means.
Personally, I've always very much interpreted that to mean both binary and source.
Personally I would still include it in both, but I always had the impression that MIT was looser than BSD-2-Clause about this. BSD-2-Clause explicitly states that binary distribution needs to include the notice in "the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution", and I have a feeling that the license authors might've had a reason to want to be explicit about it.
Just to clarify - would it still work if I deny network acess for the TabNine binary, _after_ validating my license key? Or is the key validation invoked on every launch (hence requiring network access)?
(License key validation requests go to tabnine.com, so you should blacklist that too if you want to deny all network access.)
Ie, could we write a monitoring proxy where if enabled, all traffic goes through this proxy. This proxy enables the end user to monitor 100% of traffic, all http requests, and could even have a secondary documentation flow that explains the I/O for security minded individuals.
Then you'd shut off remote network access to the binary, monitor all traffic, and feel secure knowing that it's only sending what it says it's sending, and why.
With that said, I imagine you could do the same thing with a sniffer. Perhaps a documentation standard could be built into request/responses, so a monitoring program like Wireshark could snuff the I/O and see what it is.
Do you have any thoughts on how someone could both network-license, and make you feel secure in their I/O? Ie, no trust needed?
In this particular case, the use of TLS (good!) makes it relatively challenging to inspect. Assuming the author isn't shipping a cert in his binary (doesn't look like it) - I'd have to spinup a new VM, load a custom root cert, and mess with a TLS terminating proxy / forwarding solution, and hope he's not using a secondary stream cipher on top of TLS. Maybe I get lucky and https://mitmproxy.org/ or something just works out of the box. In any case, lots of effort to know he's not siphoning up all the source code on the local machine and using it to train v2 of his project. And the more robust the DRM solution, the less feasible it is to inspect.
[0] https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcrip...
I’m not suggesting this is perfect in any case, but it would at least place an upper bound on whatever amount of IP leakage you think might happen.
With such a setup, users can see exactly what data is outgoing, have a reasonable belief they know what's incoming is harmess, main app gets no network access, agent has no access to secrets/system, and agent can be open source (entirely or mostly).
So, there's a quick brainstorm from how I did privilege-minimization for high-assurance security. This is basically a proxy architecture. That's a generic pattern you can always consider since it can help protect lots of risky apps both ways.