About 99.99999999999% of people don't want anything to do with your code, your site, your work, or any project you will ever do. Someone illicitly copying your work sounds more like a goal than a problem cause of how popular it needs to be first.
Nah. Even client side UI is just that... A UI. It's trivial to copy a UI anyways by just taking screenshots.<p>If more substantial parts of our apps were client side, like if we sold an online image editor, I would be very afraid.<p>However I have doubts as to how much more vulnerable to copying JS is than anything else. People have been pirating compiled apps just as long and they don't seem any less prolific
This happened at FarmLogs once. Our bug tracker started getting some really weird exceptions due to a Chinese company reverse engineering our app with the frontend code, which had our API key in it. We didn't really mind; it was just funny.
Definitely not. Honestly I'm not worried about people seeing the backend code either. I'm sure there are exceptions but it's been my experience that the data is by far the most valuable asset for web/sass applications.
Having worked on legacy corporate code...I find it is often easier to just observe products and reverse engineer them, rather than try to understand/extend existing code. I would generally prefer to reverse engineer+rebuild. Existing code isn't always great code, it may not even be correct code.<p>And if your code really is that good and so unique that someone might want to steal it, perhaps you should try to extract it and product-ify it. Possibly as an open source project.
A little bit, yes. But it's a given now that client-side JS is open source, and many have got used to this. I've seen developers try to obfuscate their code using obscure packing utilities, and abusing eval(), but such code is trivial to de-obfuscate/unpack, and doing so only makes me want to see the code <i>more</i> since you've something to hide.
Obfuscation works. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough that it's substantially harder to copy/reuse than to do whatever the alternative is (rewrite, buy, etc).
Would a serious competitor ever risk being sued by copying your code verbatim? Would copying just parts of your likely obfuscated codebase and trying to integrate it into their own codebase be more difficult than reverse engineering it?<p>I don't think it's something to worry about. Someone that is smart enough to steal and use your code is smart enough to use a legal alternative.
Yes, well, to some degree. The best you can do is minify it.<p>I'm more concerned with competitors copying designs, and witty UX concepts than actual JS code. This you can put obstacles in front of by making some things only available post-purchase, or by "demo only" if the customer is undecided.