From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2004-06-04T04:00:15+09:00 Subject: Re: Obfuscating Ruby Code. Hello Will, WD> Austin has already mentioned that it is obfuscation, not 'pirate-proof', but WD> if you want to up the ante, just statically link 'foo.c' with the ruby WD> intepreter libraries. You can of course then insert your own library functions WD> with elfsh, but this makes it a bit harder. It does not really take more then 3 minutes if you have a scriptable version of gdb and place a breakpoint on the function that triggers a script which does the same as my previous patch. But here you also get into the GPL trap. I don't think that your customer would use a lawyer to make some trouble but maybe your competitor would do so. At least i know a few who would do this and i know a few german hardcore rubyists who would welcome this. I know that obfuscation is not pirate-proof. And i would never use a non compiled language when writting something that must be (at least a little bit) pirate-proofed. Thats also one of the reasons why my IDE is written in Eiffel and uses some python scripting only for non sophisticated things. With a BSD like license you could simply use your own function and call the static "yycompile" function. Using this would make it much much harder - you have to manually track down the code through an assembler, thats time consuming. Especially if you use some easier to write automatic code manipulations on the C code. -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's