On 12/11/07, Jan Ciger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Kao Cardoso Felix wrote: > > On Dec 10, 2007 11:24 PM, Lunpa, The <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >> I'm still puzzling on how you'd do a closed source software project in > >> python anyway :). > >> > >> (other than by keeping it in-house) > >> > > > > Distributing only the bytecode (.pyc or .pyo) > > > > (: > > > > That probably wouldn't work too well because that is dependent on the > specific Python version you are running. However, there are tools that > compile a self-contained .exe file out of the Python code, including the > Python runtime. > > Furthermore, e.g. Soya consists of a lot of code that is in binary > extensions compiled from Pyrex, not pure Python. You could withhold > source to something like that. > > Another option used a lot are various code obfuscators. > > So there are ways how not to give out source to your Python applications > if you really want.
pyc and pyo files are just py files in a way thats optimised for use by the interperiter; they are a very poor protection against reverse engineering, etc. (I've heard its not that hard to make them human readable) Also, py2exe just makes a striped down python interperiter, and bundles the pyc/pyo files with it, usually in a zip file. Code obfuscation or writting the sensative bits in C/C++/pyrex would work, but in the former, if you're putting that much effort into making it so people can't reverse engineer/see your code, you might aswell do it in a compiled language, like C. For the latter case, its probably better just to write the whole thing in C. This is important to consider, because the most common way that the code is going to be proprietary is in a way that its used in an inhouse project as we've discussed before, in which the liscense is really unimportant anyway for reasons already discussed above. I do think it is very fair to assume that most public projects that make use of soya/python will be under a free liscense of some kind anyway. So, to the other consideration, liscense change for political reasons; the political reasons of patents and DRM are very likely to be non-issues for the reasons said above (in that, both types of programs are intended to be secretive, and keep thier inner workings as inaccessable to the end user as possible). The liscense choice in this case is entirely asthetic; If you take this entirely upon appearances, soya is ideally a modern, "avant-garde" 3d engine. GPL3 is the new and improved hardcore opensource liscense. Its not going to hurt anyone if GPL3 is used, and it seems to be more in the spirit of soya to do so anyway. _______________________________________________ Soya-user mailing list Soya-user@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/soya-user
