Python obfuscation

[The Eternal Squire]

>I'm asking coz i don't have any real world/industrial basis to better
>understand the problem and factors involved when selling software - i'm
>just a student

A fair request.   The teaching of legality and ethics of incorporating
other peoples' works into one's own should begin at 6th grade and be
repeated every year until the message is driven home.

The concept of intellectual property (patent, copyright, trade secret)
is an extension into the business world of issues regarding the proper
usage of ideas (e.g. scientific principles) as treated in high school
and college.

>Do developers, when writing code consider how protected their
>code will be when considering what language they will write it in
>i.e ease of use, speed of language, maintainability and
>'obfuscatability' ?

Typically not due to a few well-known principles:  1) Essentially an
optimized (not debug!) compilation from source code to machine language
is nearly as good as encryption for hindering reverse engineering of
the distributed code,  2) Network license servers residing on a
seperate machine in the network apart from the executing software have
become the method of choice for securing more valuable software, 3)
User support and service is not an increasingly large component of the
service provided by a software product, which can only be obtained
through possession of a legal copy, 4) The time-to-market and
obsolescense windows of software are continuing to decrease to the
point where the time required to get around security is more expensive
than the utility that software provides.

Of course, all generally sweeping rules are false including this one,
but those are the trends.

All that being said:

The greatest theft of sales opportunities resides in entertainment or
gaming software.   Little can be done to stop it except through
repeated education at every grade level that copying without paying is
as bad as plagiarism and just as dangerous to one's career in school.
Ourselves and our children are lost generations with respect to ethics,
manners, and respect for authority, perhaps we can train our
grandchildren to behave more proprely.

Productivity software is less so, the market is usually flooded with
reverse engineered or lookalike competitors but brand name loyality
usually wins out.  Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software is
rarely so, due to the huge need for customer support that is denied to
an unregistered user.