Safe guard .pyc files

[Fredrik Lundh]

King wrote:

> After google a lot I didn't find any way to safe guard .pyc files from
> decompilation.

There's no bullet-proof way to do that (the interpreter needs the 
bytecodes to be able to run your program, so unless you create your own 
Python runtime, someone could always run your program with an 
instrumented stock interpreter, and get the code from there.  If you 
build your own runtime, they'll just instrument your runtime instead, 
which might be a little more work, but not much for someone who knows 
how to do such things.)

Possible solutions:

- implement portions of your application as a web service

- hardware dongles (hackers can usually get around them without too much 
work, but they work pretty well for some applications / markets.)

- use an obfuscator, e.g.

   http://bitboost.com/#other or
   http://www.lysator.liu.se/~astrand/projects/pyobfuscate/

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