定时炸弹 (软件)

计算机软件中,定时炸弹是已编写的计算机程序的一部分,它会在达到预定日期或时间后开始或停止运行。“定时炸弹”不是指安装后特定天数停止运行的程序;相反,“试用软件”适用。当软件制造商不希望在最终发布日期之后使用测试版时,定时炸弹通常用于测试版(预发布)软件。定时炸弹软件的一个例子是微软的Windows Vista Beta 2 ,它被编程为 2007 年 5 月 31 日到期 。

历史

软件中第一次使用定时炸弹可能是由Brian Reid开发的Scribe。 Reid把Scribe卖给了一家名为 Unilogic(后来更名为 Scribe Systems [1] )的软件公司,并同意插入一组与时间相关的函数(称为“定时炸弹”),这些函数将在 90天之后停用自由复制的程序版本。 [2]

理查德·斯托曼认为这是对程序员精神的背叛。 Reid没有尊重共享和共享的概念,而是为公司插入了一种方法,迫使程序员为信息访问付费。[3]

参见

参考

  1. ^ PostScript Printer Driver Optimization Case Study页面存档备份,存于互联网档案馆, Adobe Systems, Technical Note #5042, 31 March 1992. Page 5.
  2. ^ Williams, Sam. Free as in Freedom – Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. O'Reilly. March 2002 [2008-09-26]. (原始内容存档于2015-09-10). In 1979, Reid made the decision to sell Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic. His graduate-student career ending, Reid says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain. To sweeten the deal, Reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions- "time bombs" in software-programmer parlance-that deactivated freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that disabled the internal time-bomb feature. 
  3. ^ Williams, Sam. Free as in Freedom – Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. O'Reilly. March 2002 [2008-09-26]. (原始内容存档于2015-09-10). For Reid, the deal was a win-win. Scribe didn't fall into the public domain, and Unilogic recouped on its investment. For Stallman, it was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access.