Okay. It's true - I had fun writing the thread title. But I also think it expresses what this thread is about, which is:

If you write an app that needs to talk to a database, hosted on a webserver, but you also want to release the code as open source.. what do you do?

I can think of a couple options:

- Somehow binaryize the connection information
- Write an HTTP based API (which would be slower and use more bandwidth )

It crossed my mind that you could leave the connection info in there, but then I realised anyone with the code could just go postal on the database, so that's obviously out.

So what's the convention here? I don't want to have to close-source my app when it's done...