<p>I have started on a personal python application that runs on the desktop. I am using wxPython as a GUI toolkit. Should there be a demand for this type of application, I would possibly like to commercialize it.</p>

<p>I have no knowledge of deploying "real-life" Python applications, though I have used <a href="http://www.py2exe.org/" rel="noreferrer"><code>py2exe</code></a> in the past with varied success. How would I obfuscate the code? Can I somehow deploy only the bytecode?</p>

<p>An ideal solution would not jeopardize my intellectual property (source code), would not require a direct installation of Python (though I'm sure it will need to have some embedded interpreter), and would be cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Does anyone know of any tools or resources in this area?</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

Wow, there are a lot of questions in there:
It is possible to run the bytecode (.pyc) file directly from the Python interpreter, but I haven't seen any bytecode obfuscation tools available.
I'm not aware of any "all in one" deployment solution, but:
For Windows you could use NSIS(
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
).  The problem here is that while OSX/*nix comes with python, Windows doesn't.  If you're not willing to build a binary with py2exe, I'm not sure what the licensing issues would be surrounding distribution of the Python runtime environment (not to mention the technical ones).
You could package up the OS X distribution using the "bundle" format, and *NIX has it's own conventions for installing software-- typically a "make install" script.
Hope that was helpful.