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Sneaky Sneaky

We have a -government- customer that wants to buy our code so they can run the program themselves. We are using some code that we consider proprietary in nature (I.E. we developed internally how to obtain results that they seek) We want to hide that or lock their ability to understand what we do, as to retain other programs with said company - but out of good grace sell a program that is obsoleting so they may run it at their pleasure.

What sort of sneaky sneaky tricks do you guys have to bury code deep?
I was thinking of a pulling the code from a text file (have never done this). But I'm also not sure how robust that can be.
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  • Well, at the end of the day, if they are good at what they do, there probably isn't a way for you to completely hide the code.

    If you pulled the data from a .txt file, their IT department (if they're worth their weight in salt) would be able to access it pretty easily.
    If you put it into a .exe file, they might not be able to access it, but I've got no idea how you would do that.

    Otherwise, you could obfuscate the code and make all of the names and such really hard to understand, which would only slow them down, if they decided to break it apart piece by piece...

    Why not upcharge the crap out of it with a bunch of copyright and such notices, saying that "we don't care what you do with this code, but don't reverse engineer it or we'll sue"?
    AFAIK that's why a lot of companies request this sort of thing, to cover their butts
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