Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by empressplay 4317 days ago
I realise that it's become common to trust cloud services with your IP, but as expensive and onerous (and often impossible) it would be to prove that someone ripped off your code, it seems foolish to develop anything proprietary or patentable on a platform like this one, regardless of what legalese they put in their TOS.

It would be far more sensible for Codeanywhere to offer / license a VM or Docker appliance that you could host on your own server, that you could monitor its network traffic, and so on. This way you could have some sense of security.

When a chunk of source code can ultimately be licensed for millions of dollars, you probably want to have a bit more protection for your IP. Not being so much paranoid as practical.

1 comments

Your argument applies just as much to email, but it appears not to be a problem. Two reasons:

1. The legal protections and auditing are actually enough. 2. The companies hosting mail and code successfully have better security than most customers that would otherwise run those services in-house.

on your second point, I'd be careful before making that assumption. Without evidence there's no reason to believe that a supplier company will have better security than your own and it's entirely possible they don't.

Also should a supplier suffer a breach they have powerful incentives not to disclose that breach to you, and where intellectual property is involved (e.g. code) the theft may well not become immediately apparent.

The provider has a specific set expertise that's probably better aligned with hosting this service. Since it's a revenue center for them, versus a cost center, they're better equipped to make the case to hire specialists.

The your second point - legalese is very beneficial for that. In the US at least, as long as it's not a protected (by FISA, etc..) organization breaking into your provider's systems, contract law covering compromises is a fairly well developed area.

I'll put the question as follows? Do we really need such a service? Come one! Come on!