From: "Florian Groß" Date: 2005-08-19T06:12:38+09:00 Subject: Re: Protecting commercial ruby code with public/private key encryption John Wells wrote: > Could one not modify the source of the Ruby interpreter to load a public > key and then only accept code encrypted with the equivalent private > version? Would this provide adequate protection, or does it only mean > that the hacker would have to download the interpreter and make the same > modifications, loading my public key into it, and programmatically to spit > out the unencrypted code after it has passed through decryption? Is there > any way to make this sufficiently hard to do so to the point where any > reasonably complex application is protected? Similar to byte code > obfuscation? If your computer can run it I can see it. Microsoft is working on changing this. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html It's commonly considered a bad idea. The only way of doing this securely is by running as much code as possible on your server and having thin clients. Obfuscation may be a short term solution, but it still won't protect users from stealing, cracking or reverse engineering your code. (All those can also be done with the machine code traditionally produced by lower level languages like C.) Note that software is still something falls under copyright. Using the law to go against people stealing your applications is one way. The better way is to open your source up and change to a support business model or do something similar to MySQL.