From: Matt Taylor Date: 2005-04-15T22:37:26+09:00 Subject: Re: Practical considerations for licensing software written with dynamic/non-compiled languages/platforms 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 -- mailto:mtaylor@rexbot.com web: http://www.rexbot.com auction: http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/www-rexbot-com/