[python-win32] Protecting Packaged Python Apps

[Itamar S.-T.]

--- Tom Churm <churmtom@hotmail.com> wrote:

> 1)can python be considered a serious candidate for
> creating commercial 
> applications, or should i be using a different
> language (such as--ugh--some 
> flavor of C)?

Yep. There are companies selling commercial,
proprietary software  written in Python.

> 2)is decompiling a python '.exe' easily done, and
> how?

Yes - py2exe is just a ZIP or maybe gzip archive.

> 3)how do i protect the resulting .exe's against
> others decompiling them?

Can't be done. .pyc files are easily decompiled into
source code that is almost identical to original using
program called decompyle.

> 4)is there perhaps a way to encode python script
> before freezing it?

No - Python is way too dynamic for that to work. You
could do something like encrypting the source, but the
key would have to be in the package - I suppose you
could make a C extension that stores the key
internally and use that to decrypt python source code
on the fly. 

=====
Itamar Shtull-Trauring, itamar(at)shtull-trauring.org

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