[ThinLinc-technical] ThinLinc Server on Linux on Power (ppc64le) platform

[Carsten Rose]

Dear Jens, Pierre

 From time to time we also would love to look into the code.

Maybe an open/documentated API would lower the need to access the source 
code.

Thanks
Carsten


On 8/17/20 3:37 PM, Pierre Ossman wrote:
> Hello Jens,
> 
> Sorry for the late reply. It's been vacation season here in Sweden and I 
> just got back.
> 
> On 14/07/2020 08:54, Jens Maus wrote:
>>
>> AFAIR you have stated in the past that you are in principle open for 
>> releasing some more portions of the ThinLinc code as open source. Is 
>> this still the case?
>>
>> For a start we would be especially interested in the non obfuscated 
>> python code portions ThinLinc uses internally. In the current ThinLinc 
>> installation archive you are unfortunately using a code obfuscating 
>> tool to obfuscate the python code that ThinLinc uses. However, in the 
>> past we had multiple occasions here where we would have liked to 
>> tune/patch or add workarounds to the python code for certain 
>> situations. This was, however, not possible because of the obfuscated 
>> python code. So please consider to at least open source some more 
>> portions of the ThinLinc infrastructure (even perhaps starting a 
>> „ThinLinc“ GitHub project consolidating all your components) and, even 
>> better, refrain from using this python code obfuscating tool so that 
>> in future a ThinLinc installation would be distributed with readable 
>> python code that (in the event of some critical situations) could be 
>> tuned. This would in fact also allow to better give bug reports in 
>> case there are issues that are in the python code portions of ThinLinc.
>>
> 
> Unfortunately it is not something we have any plans on changing right 
> now. It is mostly a commercial decision though, and not a technical one 
> so I'm not the primary person for such a change. However it is unlikely 
> to happen until we feel comfortable that enough customers would continue 
> paying for a subscription even if a free alternative is available.
> 
> And we would likely also not want to support modified versions, even if 
> the code was easily hackable. :)
> 
> Regards


-- 
Carsten Rose
IT Koordinator / Institut für Mathematik

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