[JumpCrisscross]

> source code can usually somehow be recovered via decompiling

Absent IP, ceteris paribus, you'd run as much code as possible on your servers and obfuscate what you deliver to a client. There would be an entire industry in producing technical DRM.

[samus]

That's what the AGPL is designed to cover, and I think it's a major reason why a lot of software nowadays runs in the cloud. This is already a common way to circumvent the GPL.

Obfuscation only gets you so far. But faithfully recovering the original source code is not really the point. Even heavily obfuscated code is useful and can be worked with since in the end the program is still doing what it's supposed to do.

[immibis]

This is already possible with GPL and copyright, and companies do it. Hence the SSPL.