Originally Posted by ewan

You can't limit the distribution of Free software "The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor" is one of the four fundamental freedoms that define what Free software is. If you can't redistribute something, it's not Free.

Originally Posted by Fargus

talk about off the plot!

Originally Posted by Fargus

Think he has you there on the FOS side of things though I don't remember the original thread post mentioning FOS at all so it might be that they want to develop a closed source application to run on Maemo. I might be wrong but I don't think anything in the rules mean that all software on Maemo has to be FOS though.

Originally Posted by YoDude

This thread should get some outside attention, lol.

It would be useful for developers as a means of locking an app to a specific device to protect distribution of their apps.

Originally Posted by daperl

I think you're having a problem seeing the forest through the trees. The original post was more general than the thread title. Do you think the author meant to exclude non-GSM devices when referring to "tying in mobile apps to web apps?"

Originally Posted by ewan

The original post didn't mention FOSS, but neither did it mention using the identifier to lock down software to a particular unit, that was first brought up in this comment:



You're perfectly correct that not all software running on Maemo has to be FOSS (indeed, not all software in Maemo is FOSS), but enough of it is to ensure that this sort of game by proprietary software can be defeated - if you query an identifier from Python I can hack Python to lie to you, if you go via dbus I can modify dbus, and if you pull it from the kernel I can change the kernel.

Having free underpinnings in an OS goes a long way to defending the end users rights, which I think is a good thing. However, even if you think it's not, it's worth being aware that this sort of ad-hoc DIY DRM scheme is likely to not work on a platform like this one.

Originally Posted by Fargus

Maybe some people expect the thread title to reflect the basic subject? The only way to determine that is to ask the original poster of the thread but personally I read the two in conjunction - seems a lot of the threads on this and other forums do that.

Originally Posted by daperl

Fair enough. Let's move on.

Originally Posted by code177

As the OP, my question, essentially, is thus:

Say: I have a website, and I have an app on the N900, and I want the app to be able to communicate with the website server. However, I want to maintain a level of stability and consistency on my platform, so I'd like to be able to maintain a database on the server which may have information pertinent to that device and that device only. For example, if a person was rating something, keeping settings, or a list of some kind, they'd need to be able to access this reliably without having to enter new information.

There are plenty of ways of doing this (generating keys, auto-registrations, keeping the information locally, etc), but those aren't what my question is about

IMEI is a good bet, but wouldn't work with non-gsm devices (right?) so that's automatically limiting. A string that you can append to an API is what i'm looking for.

Thanks again

Originally Posted by Fargus

Thanks for clarifying!

I suspect that the nearest you are going to get with this is going to be a certificate system of some sort.

Most operating systems will cope with that as a fairly standard (if there is such a thing) mechanism.

Obviously this means maintaining a certificate server of some description yourself and hooking into the upward chain of trust.