Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Deployment:
Managing 4GL Applications

Possible drawbacks of unencrypted source

Unencrypted source has several possible drawbacks:

Does not prevent code modifications — Users can modify the application source, which can potentially cause difficulty when applying application upgrades.
Does not provide application source code protection — Unencrypted source does not protect your application from the user. Many Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) do not want the user to be able to see their code.
Does not prevent database schema modifications — Many ISVs do not want users to modify their application database. If you deploy using unencrypted source, you lose the ability to prevent unwanted changes. Users can modify your application and application database any way they want.
More difficult internationalization — Only r-code can contain multiple text segments for different spoken languages. For more information, see OpenEdge Development: Translation Manager .
More difficult to support — Users might create bugs when they modify the source code.