Is licensed file geodatabase really secure?

The gdal OpenFileGDB driver was reversed engineered.. I guess this reverse engineering didn't include the licensing component! Suffice to say - if current versions of gdal can freely open this data, I don't think there's any way you can prevent savvy users from doing that.

There is this blog post (in french, dated june 2015) that explain that the data are not encrypted but merely renamed with the prefix ''GDB_SecureCopy'' that ESRI product doesn't seem to by able to see or open without the licence file.

As Qgis (at this time 2.8) was able to open it (in less time that it would have taken to install the licence file to open it with arcgis) their conclusion was that this licencing stuff gives a false sense of security and that is worse than no security at all (or in other words that ESRI sucks at security and should look beyond its own closed ecosystem...)