Python obfuscation

[Anton Vredegoor]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> Money is made in many ways, essentially by creating (perceived) buyer
> advantage and capturing some part of it -- but market segmentation is
> just one of many ways.  IF your predictions are ENORMOUSLY better than
> those the competition can make, then offering for free "slightly
> damaged" predictions, that are still better than the competition's
> despite the damage, MIGHT be a way to market your wares -- under a lot
> of other assumptions, e.g., that there is actual demand for the best
> predictions you can make, the ones you get paid for, so that your free
> service doesn't undermine your for-pay one.  It just seems unlikely that
> all of these preconditions would be satisfied at the same time; better
> to limit your "free" predictions along other axes, such as duration or
> location, which doesn't require your predictions' accuracy advantage to
> be ENORMOUS _and_ gives you a lot of control on "usefulness" of what
> you're supplying for free -- damaging the quality by randomization just
> seems to be unlikely to be the optimal strategy here, even if you had
> determined (or were willing to bet the firm that) marked segmentation is
> really the way to go here.

Suppose I grant all your theories about optimal marketing strategies.
This still doesn't account for the way the market is behaving *now*. It
isn't in any way logical or optimal. For example in Holland (where I
live) complete governmental departments are dedicated to make life
miserable for the unemployed, for asylum seekers, for people that
disagree with any official policy. If looking at the recent
developments in France I find it hard to believe that such social
inequality an injustice develops naturally. To me it looks more like
it's caused by organized crime, where *official* legal governmental
organizations are either crimimal organizations themselves or are
cooperating with such organizations.

You seem to tackle the problem of python obfuscation by first proving
that it isn't feasible and then giving some kind of solution that will
work and give the desired result: webservices. However when I look at
obfuscation techniques I see a desire to profit from giving some person
the idea that he or she is superior to someone else because he has a
better product. In order to avoid copying we now need obfuscation. The
difficulty to copy the thing (whether it is a swiss watch, a sportscar,
designer clothes, the latest computer game, an ipod, a computer
program) is part of the advertising game and is the basis for
associating it with a certain status. If you look for a few minutes at
a TV screen and notice what the commercials are trying to tell you, you
will see that it's almost always that you will be better, stronger,
more popular or beautyfull etc. if only you use product X.

You are perfectly right if you would say that it is an illogical
strategy to make people feel better relative to other people in order
to get them to do something you want. Commercial entities could in
principle be free of such things but we live in a world that is
dominated by this worldview and if one tries to sell something one has
to take that into account.

So how to get the same kind of market segmentation (as you call it)
when you deploy your program as a webservice and where essentially the
cost for you (moving a few electrons to produce a solution to a
problem) is exactly the same whether you give the user a good or a bad
result. If you give optimal results to everyone, users will go to other
sites just because these sites give them opportunity to feel better
than other people, not because this is objectively better, but just
because that is how they think the world "works".

<snip>

> I hope this analogy clarifies why, while I don't think deliberate damage
> of result quality can be entirely ruled out, I think it's extremely
> unlikely to make any sense compared to ofher market segmentation
> tactics, even if you DO grant that it's worth segmenting (free samples
> are an extremely ancient and traditional tactic in all kind of food
> selling situations, after all, and when well-designed and promoting a
> product whose taste is indeed worth a premium price, they have been
> repeatedly shown to be potentially quite effective -- so, I'm hoping
> there will be no debate that the segmentation might perfectly well be
> appropriate for this "analogy" case, whether it is or isn't in the
> originally discussed case of selling predictions-via-webservices).

I agree it doesn't make sense. Like uncle Harry who thinks he can lay
golden eggs. We could cure him but we need the egss :-)

 Alternatively, lets just forget about obfuscation and try to get
people to freely share by promoting open source (and open webservices).

Anton