[moonpolysoft]

So that brings up a good issue, namely the proprietary nature of the code you're distributing. For instance, stock market analysis firms zealously guard their algorithms. Let's say I'm a potential customer: How will you protect my bytecode from being stolen by competitors when it has to be run on unmanaged machines in the wild?

[westside1506]

Good question. There really isn't anything that stops someone from reading and trying to interpret the byte code.

There is some protection in the fact that you never know what type of work unit is happening at a given time. The algorithms are typically each snippets of code instead of full applications, so someone would need to piece together quite a lot of information.

Of course, if someone is particularly concerned, they can run a jar obfuscator.