Hi had to agree with dennisT on this, the protection scheme is pretty weak and very easy to reverse it, even after the “upgrade” they did in Max 9, and most of the time is used to hide bad code practices.
See Maya (mel and python), or even Blender (even the sold scripts are open), they don’t have protection schemes for scripts. On the opposite side, you have Houdini which as the HDA that has protection.
C# is great, but very easy to check the code, of course you can obfuscate it to protected (we do this for our commercial C# plugins).
Protection on MCG would be great, in terms of commercial interest it would give a reason to create commercial tools for it, but it’s just XML with some MXS and probably would end up with a protection like MXS.
In relation to other people using some else code without permission or reference, unfortunately this happen in any language, and it’s not related to MXS only, the only difference is that in MXS and other scripted languages is easier to check and see this.
We do have something for protecting commercial scripts (and dot.net dll’s), that also handles part of the licensing in development, but don’t know if there will be enough interest from the community, apart from a few developers that have tried it and liked the direction it was going. We also use it to protect our scripts.
It’s a great tool. I think it can be a sort of standard in the future for maxscript/dot.net dll’s protection. Keep up with it!