Hiding RoR code in commercial application

Ruby
1

Is there any possibility to hide my RoR code in commercial application?
Some kind of precompiling or something like that? It’s neccessary if I
want to sell my appliaction to commercial client and I don’t want he see
my code - to prevent to sell it by my client to another client, etc.
What do you reccomend

2

Don’t know if you can precompile the code, but a small amount of
security
can be achieved by using Virtual Machines (VMWare, Xain) and keep the
code
inside, giving the root password to no one. Of course, it is not even
close
to 100% secure. A smart guy would mount the disk image as a secondary HD
on
another virtual machine and read the source code for your application,
but
at least you can prevent most people from reading the code.

Att,
Dante

3

want to sell my appliaction to commercial client and I don’t
want he see
my code - to prevent to sell it by my client to another client, etc.
What do you reccomend

Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

The best you can do is obfuscate code, but that would quite possibly
negatively affect runtime and make any sort of debugging much harder.
While
you can obfuscate - I will not comment on how as others on this list
know
far, far, far more about the topic - in my opinion, the correct solution
is
to draw up a contract/license that prohibits such client behaviour.

Felix

4

Mingle does this, now. The ruby/rails code is encrypted and must get
decrypted on the fly somehow. As always, this kind of thing is never
100% foolproof…

http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence

5

Ralph Klimski wrote:

Is there any possibility to hide my RoR code in commercial application?
Some kind of precompiling or something like that? It’s neccessary if I
want to sell my appliaction to commercial client and I don’t want he see
my code - to prevent to sell it by my client to another client, etc.
What do you reccomend

write proper license, or mayby you are using GPLed libraries in your
commercial product and can’t do that? :stuck_out_tongue:

but seriously there’s 2 ways to do that now, ruby2c (you have to pay for
program that does this automatically)
compile to JavaVM code and run with jruby.

if you can’t do that and you use only your own libraries, you can just
make license that prohibits reseling your product - simple and easy.

greets

6

google: ruby obfuscator

I have no first hand experience with an obfuscator for Ruby, but for
Java, they seem to work well.

7

You can’t compile it, but what a lot of people do is have the program
hosted and then sell the use of the application, so they have to come
to you for any changes. 37signals.com does this. They sell a
subscription to backpack, or campfire and so forth.

~Jeremy