We reached an interesting way-point: “We got to eat our own dog food”. We created a protection for the protection-tool. First the obvious: we need tamper-proofing for the same reason everybody else does. But the second point is more interesting: 
about every customer will ask us whether we protect our own tool. We just have to do it.
Of course we would have a good excuse: The majority of the NestX86 protection-tool is written in a high level, byte-coded language. Our product is about protecting machine-code in object files. That may be a very good excuse technically, but to our customers it may nevertheless feel lame.
We can’t really handle byte-codes, but we still had to fake it. Instead of writing another protection-tool, we made a custom-protection. It is a prime example for how good expert work and protection-design can make up for lots of automatic tools. We also learned the lesson we want our customers to learn: One can develop one’s own protection, but buying a tool is much cheaper. (We knew that before.)
We know our program. We know what parts we really want to protect. We know what parts might give most insight into the internal workings of the important parts. Our tools’ performance is so good, we can easily give away some computer cycles for the protection. Doing it manually, we can add some devious decoys. Not random decoys, but decoys aimed at the particular circumstances. In addition we can protect the base libraries together with the real tool. The quantity alone of the protected code should discourage most attackers. (How can an attacker crack the binary if the source code with all its documentation is still hard to comprehend?) We don’t randomly rename identifiers, but make sure our renaming causes confusion and some aliasing. A small number of artificial sub-classing, use of undocumented private algorithms and some multithreading should dot the i-s and cross the t-s. Not yet having a protection tool doesn’t mean we didn’t create a number of special-purpose hacks for modifications to our source code before compilation.
For now we skip semantics-preserving transformations, until we have a decent automatic 
analyzer and composer for byte codes. If we weren’t a penny pinching startup company we would have bought a tool from one of our competitors. The free tools we tried were too difficult to use for our program base. The grin of a competitors sales-person selling us a tamper-proofing tool would just have been completely unbearable.
Go try to hack our tool while there is still some possibility. With the next release, or maybe the after-next, you can forget that. Sorry, this is rhetorical only: For legal reasons the license for our tool prohibits reverse engineering of the tool.