Citations aren't given for the most crazy things, only the vaguely meaningful bits in between. It's load of non-sequiturs and things that don't even mean anything

What a total load of tosh. It doesn't even make sense.

Other databases can't drop columns either. In most cases (row-based databases such as the default storage on pgsql, microsoft, oracle, mysql etc), dropping a column, if that syntax is available, internally rebuilds the table with the column omitted.

The data are stored in row-major order (they are in sqlite too) and to drop a column, you need to effectively rewrite every existing row (at least, all the ones where that column is non-null)

Essentially, ALTER TABLE ... DROP COLUMN is just syntactic sugar, you can do the operation equally efficiently (albeit with more complexity) with other statements.

In any case, sqlite CAN at least drop indexes, which is something that some versions of MySQL did quite badly (without a table rebuild)

It is not really a problem.

If someone saves out your source code, then they can. You can put a copyright notice on it.

If they use it on their web site without permission, they're violating copyright. However, that isn't why it's not a problem.

All of your:

* Version history (except for public versions) * Unit tests, test plans, test data, test results * Bug trackers * Developers notes; QA engineers notes * Code maintenance manuals * Developers brains; QA engineers brains etc.

Are private, and someone leeching your content cannot obtain them.

Not to mention the fact that, if there are any server-side components, they'd need to reimplement them.

The time it would take them to understand your code, reproduce all the missing parts, they could just as well develop it themselves.

In fact, if they hired engineers with the calibre required to do that, the engineers would probably WANT to implement it themselves, not rip yours off.

Do not consider that the .js files are all of your development information. They aren't.

Additionally, the version that they leech is always going to be "behind" the one you're developing, right?

So in the time they take to figure out how your code works and how to integrate it with their own back-end systems, you'll have released a better (At least hopefully better) version. So they're permanently behind you, with an inferior product.

Also, while obfuscation can't protect you from a determined programmer (and shouldn't be done for its own sake), minification or compilation like Google's Closure compiler does will remove a lot of the information anyone looking to steal your work would like to have.

I totally agree with MarkR42 and was thinking the same thing when I had your question, OP.

My main conclusion became server side processing is the black box at least in my case where the value add is through the REST APIs the javascript works with to present the right data to the user.

Thank you for the insightful comment :)

Just wanted to add to the insightful comment, so what if another person uses a function in that .js code to solve their problem, your ideas stay yours. Also you can close down your IP into the server programming environment and call that from your .js I personally think that the proper balance between close ideas and open solutions is what spurred the web world beyond any other programming environment.

Congratulations, you've made something which looks superficially like JSON, but most documents won't parse in 99.9% of JSON parsers. Interoperability is lost, nothing is gained!