More on Protecting Source Code

[David LeBlanc]

I have read what I consider to be the narrow minded and short sighted views
wrt to protecting IP in the form of Python source code, and I would like to
make a few points.

* Not everyone believes that all or most software ought to be free. I for
one, don't.

* Owners of property have the right to control it. If you disagree and own a
nice car or house, I'll be right over :->

* Why invest a substantial amount of time and money developing in a language
that makes it trivial to gain access to the work product?

Python may be easy to use, but if it's also easy to steal software written
in it, that's an impediment to it's being widely used in commercial
products, especially shrink-wrapped products. Perhaps that's a reason why
there seems to be so few commercial products in Python, beyond those that
are fairly closely licensed and/or have substantial parts of the app written
in C/C++.

I suppose one solution is to modify the Python interpreter with different
op-codes and that ought to make it somewhat painful for the average hacker.
A better solution is to make a .pyc file approximately as hard as a binary
.exe file to decompile - however that could be done.

David LeBlanc
Seattle, WA USA