title: (Why) should I use obfuscation?
body: <p>It seems to me obfuscation is an idea that falls somewhere in the "security by obscurity" or "false sense of protection" camp. To protect intellectual property, there's copyright; to prevent security issues from being found, there's <em>fixing those issues</em>. In short, I regard it as a technical solution to a social problem. <a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg22508.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Those almost never work.</a></p>
  
  <p>However, I seem to be the only one in our dev team to feel that way, so I'm either wrong, or just need convincing arguments. Our product uses .NET, and one dev suggested .NET Reactor (which, incidentally, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2525/best-net-obfuscation-toolsstrategy#22990">was suggested in this SO thread as well</a>).</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>.NET Reactor completely stops any decompiling by mixing any pure .NET assembly (written in C#, VB.NET, Delphi.NET, J#, MSIL...) with native machine code.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>So, basically, you throw all advantages of bytecode away in one go?</p>
  
  <p>Are there good <em>engineering</em> benefits to obfuscation?</p>