Property Protection Checklist

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Some people are content to just give their code away to the world, and that’s fine for them. Most of the rest of us need to worry about protecting our property for one reason or another. Here are some intellectual property issues to consider when you’re writing code:

• Make sure you have a contract before doing contract programming.

• Consider the various alternative licenses for your software (public domain, open source, shared source, proprietary) and choose one that makes sense for your desires and circumstances.

• If you need to write a proprietary license from scratch, get professional help.

• Use obfuscation to make it harder for users to reverse-engineer your code.

• For truly sensitive code, consider running on a protected server with a web services interface.

Now you’ve finally got all the pieces put together, the manual written, and the license chosen. There’s only one step left: preparing an installation program. That’s the subject of my final chapter.

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