Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

[!smentzer@ecom.net (Steve Mentzer)]

>
>My suspicion is that this is anti-piracy design.  If you've got an
>all-in-one-folder design you can (usually) copy that application
>anywhere you like; compare this to the little-bits-everywhere
>MS approach.  How do you take, say, an MS Works preload and move
>it to another machine?  Basically you don't, unless you don't mind
>spending a few weeks tracking down and exporting all necessary
>registry entries, running DLL dependency analyzers and so on.
>


Even if you put all the DLL's in the application's folder, most software wont 
run. ActiveX/COM objects need to be "registered" before they can be used. Just 
copying a Win32 DLL to the system folder doesn't allow the application to 
access it if it contains ActiveX/COM objects.

(most software today uses COM)


>There's nothing to prevent Windows programmers from using the
>all-in-one-folder approach, but several things to discourage
>them.

The idea behind DLL's was to provide shared libraries of functions that all 
applications could use. Since the %system% directory is commonly included in 
the search path, if an application tries to use a standard tool DLL, it doesn't 
have to search for it.

However, if DLL's were installed in lots of different places, it would defeat 
the purpose of the DLL. Either the client app would have to search for an 
instance of this DLL, or you search path would have to be very long (which 
slows the computer down)..

So putting DLL's in the system folder makes sense.

Now, I agree that some applications don't need to share their code with other 
apps, but why buck convention?

smentzer@pacbell.net