How could it invalidate the patent if they're taking your code to do it?
IANAL so I really would like to understand this. How is it that patent
holders can come after people who've been using their stuff while the patent
was pending? Because they most assuredly have, even for clean-room
implementations.
Two reasons:
1. There is a one year time frame to file a patent after the concept
is "published" and source code (regardless of how accessed) is
"publishing"
2. Since I am a one person firm and very under funded (i.e. I am still
at the point of borrowing money to put food on the table sometimes) in
order to fund the patent process (about $20k) I need to license some
aspects of the algorithm (under NDA's).
3. Once patented I plan to release some aspects of it with open source
(not FOSS but the model I mentioned before) under a do not-modify and
re-release independant of me license... i.e. the user can make local
modifications but can not distrubute them... this is only on the
patented portions all other portions will be much more liberal.
So why obfuscate? Your honest customers won't hack, and your dishonest ones
won't let obfuscation stop them. Wouldn't lawyers be a better deterrent?
I worked for one company, for example, that gave proprietary source code with
their product under a non-disclosure agreement. Customers occasionally
violated the non-disclosure; when they did we found out and took a lot of
money from them.
I was thinking of using some form of public key system to encrypt the
code the license server or what ever fetches either the public or
private key (for this purpose they are interchangeable) from a server
in order to make the code executable.... now no amount of this will
prevent someone from say hooking a logic anaylizer up to the address
and data buses and decoding the instruction cycle... but short of that
I want to make it hard