Piracy Prevention For Commercial Reshade Products

I am interested in commercially selling a product (complex cinematic post effect) for Reshade users.
I would like to ask if the Reshade devs can give tips on how to mitigate piracy of commercially sold shader tools / presets, such as IMMERSE PRO and IMMERSE ULTIMATE.
As shaders are basically readable text files, I would like to know what steps could be taken to reduce the possibility of someone redistributing the files without authorization.
I am also wondering about commercial release distribution methods, and if there are any good alternatives to using Discord, such as maybe a private distribution only repo with generated user access tokens for paying customers or something.
I understand that the Reshade devs are not lawyers, and I am not asking for legal advice.
If you can comment, but would like me to move this talk to your discord server, please let me know.

Regards,
Tech Engineer 3D

ReShade is all about open source (and being free), so there is intentionally no built-in method to obscure source code. I also wouldn't really recommend doing so by other means like the add-on framework: whatever one does wouldn't be particularly difficult to bypass. So to avoid making things a chore for honest users, better to just keep it simple and open.

As a bit of feedback from an avid user of ReShade who has overall been in these "Scene" for decades... on both sides of the curtain:

It's probably not worth the amount of efforts throughout the whole pipeline (both on the engineering and administrative/maintenance) front for a myriad of reasons. I'll just quickly list some scenarios/cases and leave it to you to fill in the blanks...

* Paywalled ReShade resources always get leaked, and nefarious types end up using those leaks as seeds to spread malware. Now you've got an association with malware, and have to juggle who in your userbase has legitimate product and who has pirated stuff.
* A small portion of potential users are actually going to be paying customers. Weighing the short-gain values to the long-term community building and "brand" associations? It shows character, and your choice in what is more valuable will be visible to the community.
* Whatever you are developing probably has an existing alternative that is free, better, and actively maintained by a very experienced community. Surpassing the quality available out there for free is going to incur more tech debt than it's probably worth.

There are plenty more reasons that make this, in my opinion, the wrong tree to bark up. If you're willing to put in the engineering and have the technical expertise to make something that is secure, worth the money, and marketable... There are other avenues where monetization would be welcomed, if not expected.

What people will see is someone wedging "product" into a historically free and open source community. Are you ready for the booing and hissing from the village? Are you ready for the maintenance responsibilities and negative associations, because now that choice has led to the spread of malware? You might not have been the nefarious actor that injected malware into the resources, but making the decision that leads to pirated versions ended up in the wild, infected by malware by ones that did, would put that causality ball in your court.

These are things hobbyists/beginners don't generally think or even know about (among many, many other things). But if your goal is to be "professional" and play with money, you don't get to play naive once you pass through those gates.