packages - How to distribute proprietary Mathematica code

If I want to make package-code completely unreadable, in a way that the end-user can only call my functions, but has no way to re-engineer my definitions, how would I do that?

I know I can use Encode to make scrambled code which, quoting the doc, cannot be converted back by any Mathematica function. But even with an encoded package, the user could look at the definitions of my functions. So I should add some attributes: Protected, ReadProtected, Locked.

Would that be enough? Has someone experience with this?

Additional question: How do I distribute this? In the Workbench one has to process all Documentation files and can then create a .zip or a .tgz from its package, but there are unencoded files used. Do I have to encode the files by a script or is there already a solution?

Answer

My suggestion is to use a combination of encryption, DumpSave (as noted in some answers / comments), and Locked / ReadProtected, which should give your code a reasonable level of security. You can't make things totally safe, in Mathematica or any other language. Using DumpSave however means that you should create a version of a package for each platform you want to support. But, if you really want to protect your code, this extra work does not seem that unreasonable.

Comments

front end - keyboard shortcut to invoke Insert new matrix

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