From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2006-05-23T03:04:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Brite - A ruby compiler for the .NET platform

On 5/22/06, Kris Leech <krisleech@interkonect.com> wrote:
>
> Encryption would offer quite a bit of protection, you could hide a key
> well, not impossible to find but enough to make it easier to write the
> app from scratch than go to the trouble of steeling source code.
> :)

I feel stolen code is a legal problem, not a technical one. For one
thing, as I have argued, it is a very hard if not impossible problem
to solve with a language like Ruby (and most other languages.) But the
same aspects of Ruby that make your code available to steal also make
it easy to see who has stolen your code. At that point you can put
some legal hurt on the parties that have stolen the code.

Whereas if you build some system for encrypting the code that is
actually easily broken people can steal your code and you may never
suspect it, since you will think your code is safe.

In addition, with our current world being full of open source projects
for just about every conceivable thing, the "value" of source code has
been greatly reduced. In fact if anything there needs to be more "code
stealing" in the form of reuse because everyone always seems to want
to reinvent the wheel (at least in open source software.)

If you really feel your code is valuable then you need to make it so
that the code is never on the client machine, which means some kind of
online service, like a web-site or SOAP API.

Ryan