4.2 Authority vs User Security

There are a number of ways of providing the strong central design authority required to produce the portability and semantic security desired by users,

• Trade mark the name of the language. Publish a specification of the language under the trade name. Warn all users not to trust any implementation that does not guarantee that it implements the language. Then control implementations by only licensing the trade mark to conforming implementations.
• Create a single implementation of the language. Do not release the source code to the implementation. Release only binary executables.
• Release the source code to the implementation, but under a license that prohibits the distribution of modified versions.

Many other variations on these themes are possible, but they are all based on the idea of regulating either the "official" definition of the language or all of its existing implementations.

The solution that I (Ross Williams (ross@ross.net) have adopted (in 1992) is to release the FunnelWeb source code under a GNU license and then to write this chapter in this manual to encourage programmers to think hard if they make any changes to the language.