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List:       ruby-talk
Subject:    Re: Practical considerations for licensing software written with
From:       Matt Taylor <mtaylor () rexbot ! com>
Date:       2005-04-15 13:37:26
Message-ID: 425FC344.7040905 () rexbot ! com
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Hi Matt,

My 2c:

If you hand someone information they will do with it as they please. 
Whether it is a stock-tip, a recipe for chicken-soup, or code.

It is inherent in the nature of information that you loose control of it 
at the precise moment that you share it with someone else.  The more 
'understandable' the information is the more likely they are to use that 
information in their own creations.  They may use small sections or 
large sections of the original but the result is the same.  All of your 
hard work can be duplicated and used by someone else with basically no 
effort on their part.  It's like magic! :)

Thus the only real way to protect information is to not distribute it 
ala the ASP model or to try to obfuscate it thus making it more 
difficult to use as creative building blocks for anyone else.  This 
doesn't prevent someone sharing your work 'as a whole' but does make it 
harder for others to use pieces of your work to incorporate into their 
creations.  Also the 'trust issue' is an important factor and becoming 
increasingly so.  Sophisticated users are more and more unlikely to run 
software on their system that they themselves don't understand unless it 
comes from a 'safe' source (we all owe a debt of gratitude to the virus 
writers for educating users on this subject).

In the end though I guess the target audience determines how you protect 
your code if at all.

Never used it but here are some ruby 'compilers'

http://exerb.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html
http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html


Matt

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