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Latest activity by dnm
I'm in favor of not obfuscating Reflector. My recollection is that early versions of Reflector that I used were not obfuscated. I forget when that changed, but I think it was around late 2002 or early 2003. I'd be happy for a source code release, of course, but my understanding is that Red Gate plans to develop a commercial version of Reflector.
This hasn't been said explicitly anywhere that I've seen yet (though I've hardly scoured the forums), I've just read Lutz's email announcing the hand-off. However, in that email, the language Lutz used was that Red Gate would "continue to provide the free community version" of Reflector. This implies Red Gate is considering releasing a non-free commercial version.
A compromise might involve not obfuscating the community version of Reflector (and still not releasing the source code), but obfuscating the commercial version, with license terms to match (i.e. it is OK to reverse engineer and inspect the community version, but not the commercial version).
In the short term, I don't think the free community version and any potential commercial version would be significantly different such as to protect Red Gate from competition, and thus, open sourcing the community version code wouldn't be in their best interest. Depending on the nature of the changes made to a commercial version, that could change. Otherwise, if they were to open source the community version now, they'd almost certainly have to do under a license which prevented someone from making a competing product to their commercial version. This would almost certainly not make open source advocates terribly happy, so not a big win for Red Gate. / comments
I'm in favor of not obfuscating Reflector. My recollection is that early versions of Reflector that I used were not obfuscated. I forget when that changed, but I think it was around late 2002 or ea...