From: David Masover Date: 2008-09-25T10:25:17+09:00 Subject: Re: Protecting Ruby code On Wednesday 24 September 2008 13:40:43 James Britt wrote: > Dido Sevilla wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Sasha Bee wrote: > >> We are just starting a new project and it is going to be a commercial > >> application. So we have a reasonable question now - how can we protect > >> our code? I have searched the web but found nothing really useful. Can > >> anyone suggest any solutions or ideas about code protection for Ruby? > > > > Call a good lawyer. Have the lawyer draft a contract that everyone > > who buys your application must sign before receiving your code. The > > contract should state that they must not reverse engineer your > > application or look at the code. Hold them to it, and sue them if you > > ever find any evidence of them breaching your contract. > > > > You run the risk of having your customers feel that you consider them > criminals-in-the-making (See: MPAA and RIAA for classic examples). Not really. Almost every piece of commercial software in existence is subject to an end-user license agreement. Users are used to simply clicking through. What's more, it seems relatively unlikely that anyone would try to use said code for anything serious. If they do, you're no longer suing a consumer, you're suing a competitor who's stolen your code -- different animal entirely. If you're only talking about preventing piracy between consumers, that's a different matter -- and it has little to do with source code. I see no reason why existing DRM solutions would be any more or less effective with an interpreted language than they are with, for example, movies.