From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-03-03T19:09:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Compiling a Ruby app

Sharagoz -- wrote:
> My second concern is protecting source code.
> I realize that everything that can be compiled can also be decompiled,
>   

That is not entirely true. Or rather, it can be "decompiled", all right, 
but not into anything resembling the original source code.

> but I would like it to take a little more effort for average Joe to
> view/edit source code than to simply right-click on somefile.rb and
> opening it in wordpad.

The main question you need to ask yourself is, why don't you want Joe to 
do that?

If your goal is to prevent others from taking your code, repackaging it, 
and selling it as their own, that's fine, although there are better ways 
of doing it -- like legal measures.

If your goal is to prevent users from doing something they want to do -- 
for example, if this is a form of copy protection -- you should realize 
two things:

 - Someone (not Average Joe) will reverse engineer it, and publish a crack.
 - Average Joe will be able to find that crack.

That is true with or without source code. It's not a "might", it's a "will".

But yes, if it's not possible now, I believe it will be possible to 
compile JRuby.

But there is a reason the obvious solution is to never give your users a 
program at all -- instead, build it as a web app, and host it yourself.