And simultaneously I don't expect anyone pays for your software. If they are not able to audit it they will have no idea if they can trust it and if they can audit it they would just do it themselves. So in the end you will make more with a tip jar than you would with software that people are either too afraid to run or know how to make themselves. Which might be a valid point, if we were debating about the GPL instead of what is best practice for the people on this forum. As it stands, I couldn't give less of a fuck what license you give the code. It is completely apples and oranges to compare server and client side code (especially client side code that isn't even contained in a browser). The security implications of SR being run by the feds are far less than the implications of running a python script from the feds. It is possible to make a windows executable out of a Ruby script as well, but it contains the actual script and a ruby interpreter inside of it . I have no real idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is the same thing with python. Yeah I also think it is pretty straight forward to reverse engineer bytecode, but I was trying to imagine what a close source python program would look like. I don't know Python but I do know Ruby and even the .exe's contain the source code in them, they are a cheap gimmick that packages an interpreter and the script into a single executable file.