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protecting proprietary plugins

Posted by Robert Dougherty on Mar 04, 2009; 3:37am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/protecting-proprietary-plugins-tp3693476.html

Dear ImageJ Experts,

The software for my acoustic beamforming system (see www.youtube.com/optinav
  for sample output if you are interested)  consists of about 10  
ImageJ plugins: one for recording data, one for processing it, and  
eight or so utility plugins.  Gabriel, you'll be glad to know that the  
processing code started out at Threshold Colour.  The installation  
procedure is basically "install ImageJ, remove the contents of the  
plugins folder, put beamforming.jar into the plugins folder, start  
ImageJ, and increase the memory."   It is a little more complicated  
because the is some third party software to be installed (it is driven  
from ImageJ using AppleScript) and a hardware driver or two.  My  
question concerns securing beamforming.jar.  I know this is open  
source land, but beamforming.jar contains  algorithm trade secrets  
that I want to protect, and, in addition, I don't want it to be  
distributed to non-customers.   So far, all I do is remove the java  
files before building the .jar file.  This does nothing to prevent  
redistribution, and, as I understand it, does not protect against  
decompiling.  Is there an obvious solution?

Bob


Robert Dougherty, Ph.D.
President, OptiNav, Inc.
4176 148th Ave. NE
Redmond, WA 98052
(425)891-4883
FAX (425)467-1119
www.optinav.com
[hidden email]