From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-06-13T23:29:52+09:00
Subject: Re: ZenObfuscate - for when you really really have to ship a binary

On 6/13/06, Kris Leech <kris@alternativefocusmedia.com> wrote:
> Will this work with a Rails app?
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ryan Davis" <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com>
> To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>; <ruby@zenspider.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 3:56 AM
> Subject: ANN: ZenObfuscate - for when you really really have to ship a
> binary
>
>
> > "Being perfectly honest, your obfuscator has made me feel like
> > writing RubyCocoa apps is a commercially viable business, whereas
> > before I had my doubts." - Aidan Rogers
> >
> > - ZenObfuscate
> >      - What is it?
> >          - For when you really really have to ship a binary.
> >          - Lets you: Write in ruby, and ship a binary.
> >          - ZenObfuscate is a translator for a fairly large subset of
> >            ruby that converts your pure ruby code into a dynamically
> >            loadable binary, protecting your intellectual property(*).
> >      - How does it work?
> >            zenobfuscate has a commandline interface that takes the
> >            specified ruby files and outputs a dynamically loadable
> >            binary (.bundle on osx, .so on unix/linux and .dll or
> >            windows).
> >          - TODO: diagram
> >          - e.g., ./bin/zenobfuscate -o mylibrary lib/blah.rb; ruby
> >            -rmylibrary -e 'use_my_library'
> >          - Built on a solid foundation: RubyInline and ParseTree. Long
> >            standing open source packages for ruby.
> >      - When is it available?
> >            Available nowish on an individual basis
> >      - How much does it cost and what is its licensing?
> >            ZenObfuscate costs $2500 for a site license or is


That price looks a little extreme for what I have in mind.. are there
any alternative obfuscators? Alternatively could a
percentage-of-returns license fee be negotiated (Eric)?

Are programs written in Ruby distributable under any license you like?
A friend of mine has proposed selling a program I wrote in Ruby but
the thought of doing so made me feel like I was leveraging vast (GPL)
resources avaliable to me for free - and profiting off of them by
adding comparatively very little. I have in the past simply sold my
development time, which seemed a fairer trade since copying my
programs is a trivial task.

Does anyone here actually sell Ruby programs themselves as products?

Les