Selling Python Software

[John J. Lee]

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:
[...]
> Part of the problem is, that the "warezdoodz culture" is stacked
> against you.  If you DO come up with a novel approach, that is a
[...]

Ah, stop right there (oops, too late!-).  I think we're somewhat at
cross-purposes.  I was talking about protecting something more at the
level of source code than running programs.

I mostly agree with you on the issue of protecting "binaries", but:

> Part of the problem is, that the "warezdoodz culture" is stacked
> against you.  If you DO come up with a novel approach, that is a
[...]

Though information is indeed always incomplete, it seems a good bet
that war3zd00dz are not an issue for a consultant being hired by a
company to write a 1000 line program.  Do you disagree?

Anyway, back to source vs. binaries.  Obviously, code that's closer to
the "source" end of the spectrum has additional value.  I'd got the
impression that something rather similar to the original source could
be recovered from Python byte-code, due to its high-level nature
(albeit obviously missing a lot of stuff -- including all those
valuable names).  Certainly that's impossible with optimising
compilers (I should have stated this much more strongly in my last
message, of course -- there's no "may" or "guessing" involved there,
unlike the Python case, where I don't know the answer).


> It's not about programming languages at all.  In the end, "clever"
> schemes that are presumed to let people run code on machines under
> their control yet never be able to "read" the code must rely on
> machinecode tricks of some sort, anyway, since obviously, from a
[...]

Until MS get their grubby hands on our CPUs, anyway :-(


John