Peter Arrenbrecht's Blog

I have an idea for a piece of software that would bring a lot of value to a lot of developers. However, while the idea is quite clever, implementing it does not take that much of an effort. So how am I going to protect myself against the open source community? I could probably make a decent profit from the thing. So there is the real possibility that I can spend some of my working time working on this cool thing. But only if the open source community does not hijack it. It would not cost much, say $29 per licence. That's close to nothing for a developer. To me it would mean I would get to enjoy the fruits of my idea, that is, getting paid for working on it. Nevertheless, I believe it would be copied very quickly. And then I would not stand much of a chance against the combined might of the OS community. Is this fair? How do you people justify it?

Here's a hint: Don't disable the "DCOM Server Process Launcher" service on XP SP2. It may look like one heck of a vulnerability when you really don't use DCOM at all, but, unfortunately, Microsoft Access 2003 does. It will simply open an instant message box stating "A problem occurred while Microsoft Access was communicating with the OLE server or ActiveX Control." if the service is not running.