Bryan,

Well, for example, Ford is entirely able to purchase a Chevrolet, take it back to one of their ..eehhrr.. "research labs" <g>, disassemble it and learn from what GM has done.

Three things come to mind:

(Note: I'm using two automobile companies only as an illustration.)

1) Chevrolet can sue the bejesus out of Ford and make a tidy profit if Ford can be shown to has stolen proprietary information. IOW, existing laws protect the damaged party.

2) It is very expensive to reverse engineer any product.

3) Ford isn't interested in selling Chevys. IOW, even if they do successfully reverse engineer a Chevrolet all they end up with is a Chevrolet. If one's competitors are intellectually limited to "copy-catting" then IMO there's little long-term threat as there's no innovation. My guess is that by the time Ford gets the 2002 models reverse sngineered the 2003 models will be on the market. IOW, the competitor limits themselves, by virtue of the act of using theft/copying/'research' to never being a leadr and always being a follower.

I think the analogy holds for a lot of software companies as well. Do what you can to protect yourself but don't lose a lot of sleep over it.


>This subject has probably beaten to death. I'm sorry, but here goes again. My question is simple enough, the VFP encryption method is extremely weak and programs such as ReFox put my source code out there for the world to view, so what is the best solution?
>
>Now as I understand it you can get programs to 'wrap' around your exe stopping such things as ReFox from decompiling your code. And then there are the programs that can encrypt your exe even better than VFP does. I'm fully aware there is not 100% perfect solution, you can't stop a hacker when they have the program on their computer. I'm not looking to stop them. I'm looking to stop the average script kiddie at best. I've heard of programs such as Armadillo and Konsice (sp?), but I'm curious, what have you guys used, and what works best?
>
>Thanks,
>Bryan