python obfuscate

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 11 Apr 2014 16:27:27 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> Another reason I've heard of is to try to reduce support efforts.
> 
> If you distribute something that's easy to modify, then people will.

The majority of people will treat your app as a black box. Of course, a 
small minority (either out of actual competence, or sheer incompetence) 
will try to modify anything supplied as source code. (And who is to say 
that they shouldn't be permitted to, if they've bought your product?)

> And when it doesn't work, they'll call tech support and waste
> everybody's time trying to track down bugs that aren't actually _in_ the
> product you're shipping.

I wonder whether Red Hat and Ubuntu have this problem? Somehow I think 
that the magnitude of it is grossly exaggerated.

But in any case, this at least is trivially solved: take the md5 of your 
application, then before doing any support check whether the md5 of their 
copy has changed. A tiny Python script (small enough to visually inspect) 
can do this on systems without a md5sum utility.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/