Comment by petters

5 years ago

It's very annoying when the applications use sqlite with encryption. That is not open source, so regular language bindings can not be used.

10 comments

petters

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TheRealPomax  5 years ago

I'm not sure how slqite as your application file format has anything to do with open source, honestly. It's certainly super easy for open source projects to use, but a closed source proprietary application using an encrypted sqlite file sounds perfectly sensible to me?

We all win when folks decide to leave it accessible, but I'm not going to hold "encrypting a file format so that people can't easily reverse engineer it" against folks who are trying to sell software.

  • labawi  5 years ago

    > I'm not going to hold "encrypting a file format so that people can't easily reverse engineer it" against folks who are trying to sell software.

    I think I'd mostly disagree. Selling an application is one thing, but the data itself is usually customers' and holding their data hostage is not a proper thing to do.

    • TheRealPomax  5 years ago

      That's a tenuous argument at best, heavily relying on the application in question not offering any way to export your data, which many applications do come with. Just because the file format is locked, doesn't mean the data in it is locked. You just need the application to unlock it.

      3 replies →

  • cfn  5 years ago

    I guess he/she meant that the extension that encrypts the database is proprietary. I believe that was the only option for a while but now there is an open source alternative.

    • yellowapple  5 years ago

      Is the open-source alternative bidirectionally interoperable with the closed-source version (i.e. it can decrypt the proprietary encryption and the proprietary version can decrypt the FOSS version)? If so, then that's handy.

      1 reply →