[Catalyst] creating binaries

[Wade.Stuart at fallon.com]

"Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita at gmail.com> wrote on 01/17/2007 04:53:08 AM:

> From: "Kiki" <kiki at bsdro.org>
> > I would say that treating your customers as potential thieves won't get
> > you very far in doing business with them.
>
> 1. In a country where the pyracy is over 90%, yes I can consider the
> potential customers thieves.
> 2. I am not selling the program directly to the customers, but to someone

> that asks for some features, including hiding the source.
>
> Octavian

      My last post on this thread.  It sounds like your reason for hiding
the source is solely based on stopping piracy.  I can not stress enough
that any type of obfu you do to a perl program to hide its source is not
going to stop piracy.  All that needs to happen is for one person to take a
look at the code and view your "key check", data base connection string,
anti-piracy checks or whatever else and crack your program.  Applications
developed with C and ASM to enable these very same tactics and with a
much^4 higher cost of entry for crackers are cracked the week (eh or even
earlier) they are released.  Look at software such as some of the 3d
packages out there (lightwave, maya, 3ds) that in many forms cost > 10k per
seat.  These companies have spent thousands of man hours building in very
well hidden checks for dongles or license hacking -- but at the end of the
day, every single release gets cracked.

      Looking at return on your investment,  considering the very low bar
for getting into actual perl source vs jumping around machine language in C
or ASM generated applications, any time spent on this task is much more
likely to show returns you instead add new (or better) features to your
product.

      Octavian,  do what you want.  No one is stopping you.  You were
asking for advice about this and you have been given it.


-Wade