From: Richard Conroy <richard.conroy@...>
Date: 2006-08-14T20:38:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Using Ruby in a commercial application?

With respect to licensing, I think most of the popular libraries ship with
licenses that are the same as Ruby's or very similar (i.e. they are very
friendly wrt commercial projects).

However many of Ruby's fancy graphical libraries that you may need
for game development require platform specific binaries. These binaries
may have different licenses than the libraries that wrap them.

Keep in mind that Ruby is a big download for shareware titles. This
is probably a non-issue nowadays, but keep it in mind.

If you are interested in protecting your code, and stopping people from
disabling the nag-ware (or whatever you use to solicit money from the
people who DL your games), there is very little you can do, besides perhaps
compiling your ruby code directly to an executable (some tools exist,
added bonus is that you might get a performance boost and smaller
download). You can also ship 'less game' in your shareware version -
so that a simple edit won't open up the full thing.

There is a book out there that covers game development in Ruby (and
python & lua) probably more technical oriented.