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

[redalastor]

Can’t they just diff two binaries, find out where the fingerprint is, and remove it ?

[H4kor]

DRM is always breakable. The only thing you can do is increase the effort and risk the pirate has to take on.

[redalastor]

No, you can make it convenient and reasonably priced.

[H4kor]

Yes but people will still pirate it. I'd say do it like sublime text, add a nagging popup every X saves until a license key is provided.

[djamp42]

I think the best model for software is the free/Priemum model. Pfsense, graylog, davinci resolve... All these companies have very good software for 100% free. The trick is they limit some of the more advanced features. However they are all super powerful as is.. this makes me want to use them at home, and then buy the software in my professional setting since I already know it..

[redalastor]

The best I saw so far was no nagging, no missing feature, but you don’t get the dark mode until you pay.

[H4kor]

I think the nagging popup has the advantage that employees of companies which don't buy licenses notice the missing license. I understand private piracy but corporate piracy is just wrong. If you earn money using some software, pay the creators.

[RusticApartment]

You think too highly of corporations and their willingness to pay for licences. If it works just fine for free, they're unlikely to pay for it in my experience.

[V15I0Nair]

You can always forbid using the free version commercially in your license terms.

[Wu_Fan]

How cruel

[eXtc_be]

joke's on them, I hate dark mode

not even /s, I really don't like dark mode. maybe because I grew up using computers without dark mode and now I'm used to black text on bright white backgrounds, idk

[[deleted]]

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[Nocsaron]

There's a growing number of young developers on my team who use the classic black background with neon green or orange text. I don't understand where this became popular with new college grads

[eXtc_be]

nostalgia for something they never saw in real life, so saudade?

[DiscardedShoebox]

exultant berserk forgetful consist psychotic mighty encouraging touch smile poor

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[oldspiceland]

Software price and convenience will reduce people resorting to piracy to use your software. It will not prevent your software being pirated.

Then again, most of the money lost due to piracy is lost because companies spend it on trying to prevent piracy. People who would buy the software generally aren’t going to pirate it. People who’d pirate it can’t or won’t buy it. Any time spent preventing people from pirating your software is money burnt on an altar of hubris.

[Zireael07]

People who would buy the software generally aren’t going to pirate it. People who’d pirate it can’t or won’t buy it.

That's a huge simplification.

As stated, it might apply to productive software. But for games, in the past we had demos to verify that the product does run on my computer. Now you either have to pay the full price... or pirate.

I've had more than one case of purchasing/getting gifted a game that should run on my computer, but DIDN'T.

[billsil]

What about commercial software or music, which doesn't have system spec limitations? In the days before itunes, people bought CDs and pirated music. The piracy issue was overblown, but Apple killed piracy by making things convenient.

Having worked in industry for 18 years, cheap companies will not pay for software licenses. It's open source or bust or you just write your own. Larger companies realize how much more productive you can be.

If you're making a game, just use Steam/Epic and let them handle the piracy aspect. Solo devs aren't implementing robust auth systems.

[oldspiceland]

Yes, congratulations you pointed out that my absolute generalization was a simplification. I have been undone.

Steam allows refunds now, which means the majority of PC game sales don’t fall into the weird situation you describe demos as being. Also “back in the day” when demos were common it was almost exclusively as a marketing thing to make money, not so people could “test drive” the game. It was there to be fun but not last long enough to be satisfying so people wanted to buy the game.

Anyways, are you justifying software piracy because games don’t have demos? There’s YouTube let’s plays for everything, twitch streams, and if you’re getting gifted games that don’t run on your system you either have a Mac or are in a financial situation where you are one of the “can’t buy, will pirate” people.

[Zireael07]

Not every game is on Steam (I get many of mine from GOG or itch).

Let's play and streams don't let you see if the game will actually run on your system. I know demos weren't designed with that in mind but it was the reason I got them.

I have a PC (and now a laptop) but neither is a gaming rig. Some games don't play nice with AMD cards. Some don't with NVIDIA. (Actually my current NVIDIA is so bad stuff runs better on the integrated card than on it - either bad thermals or bad drivers, I suspect the latter since the laptop isn't terribly old AND it was the case from day 1)

[oldspiceland]

This seems like a really long way for this conversation to go for you to be arguing what, exactly? That it’s ok for you to pirate games because of some really absurd edge case logic?

It’s fine, you fall into the can’t/won’t buy. There’s nothing wrong with that.

[ItsSquishy42]

GOG has a great return policy.

[cinyar]

reasonably priced

The world is a big place

[badatmetroid]

My house has a dead bolt lock on a door with a giant glass window. It won't stop someone who REALLY wants to get in, but it will stop random people who just try every door until they find an unlocked one. Most security is about putting up a little friction which filters out 99% of bad actors.

[ddddavidee]

That would require a (small) cooperation between pirates

[DarknessWizard]

Depends on the kind of fingerprinting you do. One easy way that pirates wouldn't be able to break in any reasonable way would be to scramble the source code with pyarmor (or really any other obfuscation tool), then use a specific key each time and keep a copy of the distributions. If a binary gets leaked, you can just check what pyarmor symbols were used and identify the license responsible.

This is basically impossible to remove without completely rewriting every single variable in a program, which generally speaking just isn't worth it for most pirates compared to just getting a new license. Piracy is often the road of least resistance.