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> if what you're vending is the software instead of the service (not what people usually do now, but there was a time)

I'm very curious what this means. Can you give an example?

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Giving the client the executable to run, not running it for them. This means you can't hide the artifact from the client; for an interpreted language, this means recovery of the source code would be much easier than with a compiled output.

That being said, it's still possible to reverse engineer the code; it just makes it harder.

You could also run a limited demo of your desktop application in a browser, where people have to pay to get access to the full thing.

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