How to protect your software code?
Possible Duplicates:
How do you protect your software from illegal distribution?
Best practice to prevent software copy
Hypothetical situation:
Lets say I have built a software product from the scratch and it does wonderful things. The only problem is that, once someone takes a look at the code, they will understand it very easily and they can easily build it up themselves.
Now, the thing is that I built the code from the scratch 100% and uses a mixture of API calls. Nobody else is involved in the development of the code.
If I want to sell this product, what is the guarantee that someone much smarter than me will reverse engineer the whole thing and come up with better product?
Right now I am thinking of fragmenting the whole code. Adding lots of redundant code and tonnes of comments.
Is there any software which encrypts the software code, that will make debugging, troubleshooting, and understanding how the code works virtually impossible? and yet runs as usual? so that the developer can have peace of mind?
Answer
Very few things in a program are truly novel. Almost everything that you are likely to put into your code, someone else could invent on their own. Generally more easily than they could learn it by reading your code. Reading code is harder than writing it, and most programmers don't really like doing it anyway.
So it's much more likely that they will look at your app and think "I could do that", then "That's cool, I'm gonna read that code and then copy it!". Even if they understand it, you will still own the copyright, you still get to market first.
I recommend that you just forget about it.