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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

I get bad vibes whenever I see server software that isn't permissively licensed at least far enough that I can see the code. So I go look at their FAQ to see what they say about getting source access:

http://gwan.ch/faq#license

WTF? I mean, in what universe would I trust this sort of handwaving? Lumping people who might want to actually, y'know, audit the software they're running in with "oh my god they wants to steals my codes!"...I think I'll pass and encourage those I know to do likewise. (Plus, as cdcarter notes elsewhere in this thread, his reasoning for no OS X binary is incoherent at best, and reading posts by the author makes me wonder exactly what chain of jerkstores he's supplying with his attitude.)

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Eh, I'd be disinclined to use it just because it's not open-source, but I'd kind of respect it if he'd just said "It's my code, and this is how I prefer to license it." But instead he offers a positively insane rationale for making it closed-source that may as well be "Cthulhu wills it so! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh!" That makes me extremely wary of this software. Either he seems a little unstable or he's lying about why he won't open the source up. Neither is an attribute I look for in a vendor I depend on to run my servers. I might be able to tolerate the first if it were open source, but it gives me the willies here.

Sure - don't get me wrong, if he doesn't want to give out the source, that's fine. I won't use it, but that's fine. But then, like you said, he's invoking Old Ones and Providence, Rhode Island, and that is all sorts of wacky.

I'm getting LoseThos vibes here a bit.

This bit of thread http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/5550/#... manages to sum up the entire experience of digging into G-WAN that I went through tonight. Fernandos (a veritable G-WAN groupie who hangs on the forums posting Apache vulns) starts rambling about side channel attacks, which leads to Pierre (the maintainer) describing a very romantic scene of him listening to recordings of his programs executing because he learned to visualize the code better that way.

They also disable copy-paste. No trust in them whatsoever, they seem like total control freaks. Wouldn't surprise me if there were some sort of backdoor.

maybe.. possible.

Indeed. Distributing source code does not mean that people can or will fork your project. You have to explicitly grant permission to distribute the software freely, and in particular to distribute modified copies, for that to happen. http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html

Copyright law gives users more rights than users or developers probably realise. Personally, I am happy to release my software with source code under either a simple copyright notice, or in the public domain with my moral rights asserted.

Throwaway, because I'm pretty sure I will be exorcised for this but.. I've never seen a situation where any of my contributions to open source have provided me with the least amount of income. If an author doesn't want to open-source his code, I don't see the big deal.

I suppose the HN crowd that legitimately wants to read code, but the majority of the people are going to go to the trouble are going to be programmers who are being whipped mercilessly to build some 3rd rate web app for their corporate masters, or competitors who want to improve their own technology.

BTW: Can you link the license page? I am looking for it, but can't find anything.

(Mind you: I do think the author is somewhat insane and sounds like almost every bitter 1980s programmer I ever met - but I'd like to see the insane conditions he imposes)

You don't see "the big deal" about running software in a web stack that you can't look at? I can, and have, dig through every piece of software in my web stack. My grasp of postgres is not strong, but I've set up shop in the Linux, nginx, and JVM source code before and I am much, much more confident in my tools for it.

I don't use IIS either, and for similar reasons. I'm less worried about it on a desktop (and will run Windows or OS X without complaint) because they're not running things for which I have to care about performance or uptime. But for a service, it's non-negotiable.

His "product" is simply nowhere near valuable enough to risk this level of insanity and obfuscation.

The license can be found in the manual[1] and is included with the software.[2]

[1]http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf

[2]http://gwan.ch/download

From the site (which seems to disallow copy-paste):

> The next time someone feels the need to publicly call G-WAN's (1-page) license "weird" or "insane", look at what they sell and who they get their revenues from. Unlike for G-WAN, what they offer is not free for all.

They have redefined the word 'free' into a fine mist if they expect you to believe Apache and nginx are not free. They're doing something I've seen done before; oddly, it was mainly being done by Usenet trolls.

Slightly off topic but a hobby I've picked up recently is breaking web based "no copy/paste" schemes.

Usually people map onmousedown,click,oncontextmenu, etc. events or some permutation there of to return false and have an alert that say's something to the effect of "no copying!"

You can easily defeat those by mapping whichever function to null on your javascript console. ie:

  document.oncontextmenu = null

The Gwan guy's solution threw me off a bit because I was looking for another javascript version to no avail.

In an interesting twist they've actually used css. That is every vendor permutation of.

  user-select: none;

To disable that use your favorite developer tools and remove those styles from whichever element you want to copy..

Build + Release a browser extension - I'd download it.

Do you have Firebug for Firefox (press F12 to bring it up) or the Developer Tools (Ctrl-J) for Chrome? They make it trivial to toggle/edit CSS attributes on webpages.

In GWAN's case (using Firefox) the rule was:

p, h1, h2, h3, h4, ul, ol, legend, label { -moz-user-select: -moz-none; }

There are already quite a few out there. Search your favorite browser's extension archive for something along the lines of "enable right click." (For example, Firefox has RightToClick.)

>They're doing something I've seen done before; oddly, it was mainly being done by Usenet trolls.

Every time I read something off that webpage my mental voice uses my Japanese "Engrish" accent to read it. So I can't say that I was really surprised when I saw that. (I'm actually getting the vibe that the lead developer may have lost a few of his marbles.)

At the same time it totally took a shotgun to the guys credibility when he implied that projects like nginx aren't free but G-WAN is.

Just wait to you get to the part where he suggests that instead of rewriting URIs you should just use the servers cache function to cache to a static page with a very low expiry.

I may be giving them too much credit, but I believe the author is referring to the proprietary software companies who would presumably steal G-WAN, rename it, and sell it. Their argument is still ridiculous, but I don't think they're talking about the Apache and nginx projects.

That might be what he tried to mean, but that's not what he's saying. What he wrote says that anyone who wants to see the source code is an evil Snideley Whiplash software companies, and telling you to "see what they're selling" (or that they're "end users" who don't need to see anything at all, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!).

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