Chapter 18: Practicing Safe Source

Mull It Over

  1. How can you reliably release your source code to other people?

The easiest option for proprietary source code is not to release it—then you’ll avoid all sorts of problems. If you must ship code, don’t forget to sort out licensing and get NDAs in place first. Know the size and extent of your audience and, if it’s important to you, take measures to ensure that the code doesn’t leak further afield.

For open source projects, this is not such a big concern; by their nature, they ship as source.

Before release, make sure that there are clear copyright and license notices in every source code file.

There are several mechanisms for a source code release, with differing abilities to guard against your code getting ...

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