obviscating python code for distribution

[geremy condra]

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Littlefield, Tyler
<tyler at tysdomain.com> wrote:
> Hello:
> Thanks all for your information and ideas. I like the idea of open source; I
> have a fairly large (or large, by my standards anyway) project that I am
> working on that is open source.
>
> Here's kind of what I want to prevent. I want to write a multi-player online
> game; everyone will essentually end up connecting to my server to play the
> game. I don't really like the idea of security through obscurity, but I
> wanted to prevent a couple of problems.
> 1) First I want to prevent people from hacking at the code, then using my
> server as a test for their new setups. I do not want someone to gain some
> extra advantage just by editing the code.
> Is there some other solution to this, short of closed-source?
> Thanks,

I don't know that closing the source does you much more good than
obfuscating it. The obvious attack surface here is pretty much totally
exposed via network traffic, which any legitimate client can gain
access to. A better approach would be to simply write more secure code
in the first place.

Geremy Condra