[portland] Protecting Intellectual Property In Python Applications

[jonathan karon]

Rich,


On Jan 21, 2010, at 9:15 AM, Rich Shepard wrote:

> How would you protect the
> underlying source code from being mis-used by a potential competitor  
> when
> you sold your application to clients?
>

I've used some of the bundling tools mentioned here to build a  
standalone distributable app:

http://effbot.org/zone/python-compile.htm

I'm not sure whether any of these pre-compiles your source to bytecode  
and whether the distributable must include the source python files or  
not, but it's a place to start.  Python bytecode is certainly not  
immune from reverse-engineering, but it's a big step better than raw  
source with comments.

You could also look at pyobfuscator:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~astrand/projects/pyobfuscate/


~jonathan