HACKER Q&A
📣 philonoist

How can we curb piracy with WebAssembly?


How can we curb piracy with WebAssembly?


  👤 dangitnotagain Accepted Answer ✓
It’s more likely to encourage the war against open source.

Come on, tell me you haven’t noticed there’s a secret war brewing to supplant open source.

The day shall come when we may no longer “view source”, where open source licenses and their code repositories are no longer prominent.

There will be business news articles about how lucky you are, the safety of your children and the well being of your communities, all due to responsible companies “making sure” their source codes are safe and well looked after by professionals.

You think it’s too big to fail (OSS), yet it is common to miscalculate the consequences of over leveraging public perception, let alone their sentiments for security where appetites are concerned.

In a world where sources are no longer free, we will all be made “pirates”, you will see.


👤 rapnie
In a WASI world.. allowing to give that formerly-FOSS-component-suddenly-turned-propietary-commercial the boot and replace with another FOSS component. Compete on quality-of-service, not by vendor lock-in. No need for piracy.

👤 not_your_vase
What kind of piracy? Like torrenting? Or the eye-patch/peg-legged/aarrrrgh-saying version? Either case, why would you do that? Also, why would you do with WebAssembly instead of JQuery, or Rust?

👤 nektro
don't bother trying to curb it, all you'll get is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect