From: "Florian Groß" <florgro@...>
Date: 2005-04-16T06:55:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Practical considerations for licensing software written with   dynamic/non-compiled languages/platforms

Matt Taylor wrote:

> Never used it but here are some ruby 'compilers'
> 
> http://exerb.sourceforge.jp/index.en.html
> http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html

Those are really only ruby 'packagers' in that they collect source code 
and package it into a single binary. They don't even try to make the 
source code in the binary less clear.

I suppose you could instead try nodewrap[1] or something similar which 
is close to shipping byte code -- you will lose some information, but 
will usually still have enough of it to be able to understand the code 
logic in case you chose to reverse engineer.

There really isn't much more to stopping your people from building upon 
your source code than removing things that help humans, but not 
machines. In Ruby that will probably mean using non-meaningful names and 
perhaps stripping comments and whitespace when they are ignored by Ruby.

[1] http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/nodewrap/