Any Professional Coders Out There?

[whyBish]

Does anybody know the best way to lock-in the authorship of a set of uncompiled code (say, for a scripting language) to protect it from thieves?

I was thinking of registering the code on sourceforge.net (like mailing myself a manuscript), but I'm not sure that's the best way.
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I suppose the question is: Are you asking about protection from theft of the source, or theft of the ownership claim?

for authorship, proof of first authoring via registering somewhere will give you no legal rights (as far as I'm aware), and no practical protection.

For protection of the source you either have to:
a) Have the compiled code only execute on the server
or
B) Only allow compiled code on the client... but compiled code can be reverse engineered (e.g. java or CLR code... there are 'obscuration tools for these but their value depends on the logical complexity of the code, and writing the code poorly in the first place ( :wacko: ) obscures it better than the 'obscuration' of an O.O. language by renaming variables methods etc.) Also, if the user is not after the source, but just the runtime, then you are still screwed under this option.