If you are trying to protect IP from competition, I see two answers. The idea, will be hard to protect. A capable engineer looking at the code will figure out the gems of the logic and be able to reimplement. Obfuscation will make it a lot harder for people to just pick up the code and include it in their own product. The maintenance costs will continue to grow as they attempt to make changes (I'd say that is also true for cleanly decompiled code).