Yeah, but I guess its somewhat dependant on the sort of industry you're in. Consumer grade applications, meh, who really cares if I can see the "source" to how you format a report or some such triviality.

However, in commercial scientific/engineering software you can guarantee that there's some sort of precious IP lurking in there, the kind of stuff that you probably wouldn't want to make it easy for your competitors to see.

For example, the non-obfuscated software I mentioned running through .NET reflector generates "data", but it's the mathematical algorithms that do all the clever bits to generate this data, they're very non-trivial, I was staggered to find them sitting there staring at me.

You're definitely right about the bar being dropped, I frequent a number of embedded forums and the number of requests you get from people asking trivial programming questions makes you worried that these people are actually trying to write embedded software, if you can't grasp the basics of software development I'd suggest that embedded development *really* isn't for you.

It's warming to know that there are other developers (here!) our there that understand IP/security issues and have them in the forefront of their minds from the outset.

FWIW I've also seen proprietary embedded devices which contain lots of IP have completely unencrypted firmware updates.