>I'm asking coz i don't have any real world/industrial basis to better >understand the problem and factors involved when selling software - i'm >just a student
A fair request. The teaching of legality and ethics of incorporating other peoples' works into one's own should begin at 6th grade and be repeated every year until the message is driven home. The concept of intellectual property (patent, copyright, trade secret) is an extension into the business world of issues regarding the proper usage of ideas (e.g. scientific principles) as treated in high school and college. >Do developers, when writing code consider how protected their >code will be when considering what language they will write it in >i.e ease of use, speed of language, maintainability and >'obfuscatability' ? Typically not due to a few well-known principles: 1) Essentially an optimized (not debug!) compilation from source code to machine language is nearly as good as encryption for hindering reverse engineering of the distributed code, 2) Network license servers residing on a seperate machine in the network apart from the executing software have become the method of choice for securing more valuable software, 3) User support and service is not an increasingly large component of the service provided by a software product, which can only be obtained through possession of a legal copy, 4) The time-to-market and obsolescense windows of software are continuing to decrease to the point where the time required to get around security is more expensive than the utility that software provides. Of course, all generally sweeping rules are false including this one, but those are the trends. All that being said: The greatest theft of sales opportunities resides in entertainment or gaming software. Little can be done to stop it except through repeated education at every grade level that copying without paying is as bad as plagiarism and just as dangerous to one's career in school. Ourselves and our children are lost generations with respect to ethics, manners, and respect for authority, perhaps we can train our grandchildren to behave more proprely. Productivity software is less so, the market is usually flooded with reverse engineered or lookalike competitors but brand name loyality usually wins out. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software is rarely so, due to the huge need for customer support that is denied to an unregistered user. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
