{Spam?} [ale] (reasonably) mature GUI solutions in Linux

[Irv Mullins]

On Monday 15 September 2003 11:50 am, Jason Day wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 06:49:58AM -0400, John Wells wrote:
...
> I've always assumed the compiled python files were
> > really just for optimization and were pretty easy to reverse
> > engineer...is this not the case?
>
> Java is the same way.  I don't know about python, but there are tons of
> decompilers for Java, both free and commercial.  There are even plugins
> for most of the Java IDEs to decompile a .class file and open it as an
> editable .java file in the editor.
>
> There are obfuscators, of course, but they can only do so much.  The
> bottom line is, it's not very difficult to get a .java file from a
> .class file.

The trick used by, for example, Euphoria is to mangle variable and function 
names, reorganize the program flow, and encode strings so that it would take 
a skilled programmer much longer to "decompile" the byte code and make a 
minor change than it would take the same programmer to write a new program 
which performs the same functions. 

An unskilled programmer without knowledge of how the language works would take 
nearly forever to "decompile" and modify anything beyond "hello world".

No matter how obfuscated you make the source, there's nothing to stop someone 
from just copying a program and using it as-is. You have to devise other ways 
of preventing this. But is any of this really a problem - as long as you're 
not selling games, that is?

Irv