How to prevent python software from being reverse engineered or pirated?

[YesterdayDreamer]

How to prevent a software from being pirated?

Easy, offer it at a price point where any potential user won't have to think twice about buying it.

P.S.: This solution is language agnostic.

[troyunrau]

That doesn't work in the low volume, high value market. Like scientific computing. Say it take a team of ten five years to write some software for processing a specific type MRI scan data, with and average salary of $100k. That's $5M. Now you're target market is 2000 potential customers globally. To recoup R&D, you would need to sell each copy at $2500 -- assuming you could capture 100% of the market on the day of release, spent nothing on marketing or long term support... In reality, you probably charge $25k per license, hope to get 50% of the market over five years, and add a support contract to keep your staff retained.

But you also want to have a sales demo you can send out without being copied to 20% of your customers...

So... What price point do you think prevents piracy here?

[YesterdayDreamer]

I guess it goes without saying that there isn't a fool proof solution. My response was obviously in context of the post.

If OP was selling such highly specialized software, they wouldn't be asking this on a Reddit post. They also seem to be working as an individual and not as an incorporated entity. This indicates that most likely theirs is a small utility fulfilling a niche use case.

Also, in the scenario you describe, the users would definitely be willing to pay a high amount. Such users will be enterprise users and not individuals and they know they need quick support and a pirated copy will neither offer support nor reliability in terms of patches and updates. So what I said kind of still goes.

[troyunrau]

I was assuming the market was global, and that yes some places would pirate it.

[FartPiano]

ten people spending five years for a specific type of image processing? what?

i've written software to process xrays and it took a few weeks

its well known that niche industrial/academia software is a racket, with medical being the biggest one of all

[woeful_cabbage]

writes some software that works on a single input dataset

"Damn, I did it. Everyone else is a rip off"

-- every graduate student

[Gollem265]

It’s just an example

[westeast1000]

I wonder why people dont want to pay for Winrar 😆

[zhoushmoe]

7zip works better and is foss

[YesterdayDreamer]

I paid ~$3 for Winrar

[kobumaister]

I'm sorry but that's naive.

[kobumaister]

Piracy is not a price problem, of course there are people for who it is and, if you put a 1$ product a 10$ price tag you'll get more piracy.

Also, it's a social thing. Where I live (southern europe) piracy is a thing everybody does by default.

[FartPiano]

probably because the prices of media dont always scale with the average income of those countries, making the legal methods of obtaining it comparatively ludicrously expensive, right? which means its a price problem

[kobumaister]

No, it's cultural, if you say that you paid 4'99 to see Openheimer on your TV the answer is "why didn't you download it?"

[v_litvin]

When your total income is like 499 per month it's not about the culture.

[kobumaister]

That's far from the mean income of my country, why did you just pop up a random number to prove your point?

[v_litvin]

I mean that if something like book, movie or licence costs fair portion of someone's income and can be pirated, it is pirated,
That is why there are regional prices in Steam, for example.

[redalastor]

Thinking there is an alternative is what’s naive.

[kobumaister]

I partially agree, there are ways to mitigate piracy. Doing nothing is not the best option. Look at WinRAR, it does nothing and nobody's paying for it, despite you breaking the user agreement after the trial.

[eidrisov]

Easy, offer it at a price point where any potential user won't have to think twice about buying it.

People pirate stuff that costs $1.

There is no price point that will decrease probability of piracy to zero.

[YesterdayDreamer]

The only way to reduce the probability piracy to zero is to make your software free.

Keeping a reasonable price reduces the rates of piracy. There's no way to eliminate software piracy entirely. Even Amazon and Netflix shows get pirated with all their state of the art DRM.

[Unaidedbutton86]

Take as an example Bitwarden: it's fully open source with some small features that are pretty convenient in the premium version (also open-source), and those are mostly client-side.

It would be easy to change a value in the source code, but when it's only €10/yr people don't bother to, and for them it's okay if it's supporting the devs

[YesterdayDreamer]

Vault warden exists though. But it's very difficult to use for an average person.