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This is a hypothetical scenario (ie: I just thought it up and I do not intend to do it!)
What stops a company from preventing the effective use of a derivative GPL work by doing the following
So technicly they have released the source code back in to the community. but it is practicly useless.
I know that would be a pretty low thing to do and it would be against the spirit the GPL but does the GPL prevent against this type of abuse? If so how
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Obfuscation means to make something difficult to understand. Programming code is often obfuscated to protect intellectual property or trade secrets, and to prevent an attacker from reverse engineering a proprietary software program. Encrypting some or all of a program's code is one obfuscation method.
Ultimately, code obfuscation alone is not enough to handle complex mobile security threats. Although it makes it more difficult to read and understand an app's code, the availability of automated tools, when combined with hackers' expertise, does not make it impossible to reverse-engineer.
The purpose of obfuscation is to make it difficult for humans to understand the data. Encrypted code always needs to be decrypted before execution, while obfuscation does not require that code undergo de-obfuscation to execute it.
The main reason to use obfuscation is to protect intellectual property as you have indicated. It is generally much more cost effective to a business to purchase an obfuscation product like . NET Reactor than it is to try and legally enforce your copyrights.
From the GPL:
The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
I guess it would be pretty hard to make a case that the (in whatever way) obfuscated form is the preferred form for modifying.
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