Timeline for What are the best practices to keep your ethereum smart contract code from being copied and reused?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 28, 2017 at 0:41 | comment | added | Ryan.lay | "100% ripping off the original development". Quite honestly, almost every software product can be ripped off if someone applies enough resources to it. The key is to offer value beyond the product itself. I can clone the entire Airbnb website all by my lonesome but I wouldn't be able to clone their market penetration and network effects. | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 20:16 | vote | accept | Jason Cochran | ||
| Aug 15, 2017 at 20:15 | comment | added | lungj | No, I think your reaction is perfectly justified. However, you might want to rethink your business model. There's a lot more to companies than their technologies. There are things like trust, support, first-mover, marketing, vendor lock-in, and more. You can use these to your advantage! Instead of seeing this transparency as something that will hobble you, perhaps it's better to think of it as a strength: instant trust that you're not hiding a ticking time bomb in your code. By asking, you're understanding what you're getting into which is probably 10 steps ahead of your competitors! | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 20:13 | comment | added | lungj | Why do people use the major land-line or electrical providers even when cheaper competitors exist despite the infrastructure being identical? In terms of cloning, anyone can fork the Bitcoin code and create their own blockchains and they have -- the source is publicly available! But why do people keep using Bitcoin instead of switching en masse to the other cryptocurrencies? | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 20:13 | comment | added | Jason Cochran | Fair enough... you think I'm overreacting? Granted I'm ignorant on many aspects of Ethereum. If a client hired you to build a dapp, would you recommend using a private node? | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 20:10 | comment | added | lungj | As I'm sure any VC will tell you, they're usually not investing in products, they're investing in people. They're investing in the team's ability to execute. For example, several open source projects make money without selling their software. Pepsi has a "Coca-Cola clone" and I'm sure many other companies have tried to dethrone this duopoly. The patent for acetylsalicylic acid, has expired; why do people keep buying the brand name Aspirin instead of a generic which has, ostensibly, the same product? | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 20:05 | comment | added | lungj | Tongue-in-cheekily (another answer to follow as a comment): Let's say it's 1981 and you're IBM and have a product called a "personal computer" and have partnered with a small company named Microsoft to market and sell a product called MS-DOS. Later, they discover that some would-be "hackers" can easily copy the software and sell it for themselves. Who in their right mind would want to create a product for an IBM PC? | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 19:56 | comment | added | Jason Cochran | OK let's say that I am an entrepreneur who has $10m VC funding to build something on the Ethereum block chain. I hire a large team of developers and build some awesome dapp and deploy my smart contracts. A month down the road they discover that some would be "hacker" copied the deployed contract bytecodes and is using them for their purposes; ie: 100% ripping off the original development. So in the above situation, you are saying the is no way to prevent this from happening? To me that seems really bizarre. Who in their right mind would want to use Ethereum to create a product? | |
| Aug 15, 2017 at 2:44 | history | edited | lungj | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 15, 2017 at 2:21 | history | edited | lungj | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 15, 2017 at 2:09 | history | answered | lungj | CC BY-SA 3.0 |