Wow - what a great thread - so many ideas and points of view.  This is what
I appreciate most about the Ruby community:  everyone comes to the e-table
with an open mind and an opinion.  So, now that the dust has settled, allow
me to weigh in.  Clearly, a hacker-proof solution is problematic, not just
specifically WRT Ruby but in general (despite Macrovision's claims to the
contrary.)  In my case, the objective is obfuscation, not piracy protection
(via encryption ) as the work I'm doing is generally of little use to
parties other than my clients.  That said, I'd like to keep my clients
honest with respect to their contracts and to protect certain technologies
from being unreasonably pilfered and obfuscation more or less satisfies the
80/20 rule for this purpose: it poses a reasonable barrier to misuse and
appears to meet a minimal standard for trade secret/IP protection (i.e.,
should someone exploit such code their intent would be undeniable; intent
generally being very hard to prove.)   If those who support the idea of a
Ruby obfuscator continue to think such a utility would be of some value, I'd
be interested in collaborating to develop a solution that would be of wide
appeal.

Sincere Regards,

Ken.


"Ken Hilton" <kenosis / comcast.net> wrote in message
news:ub6vc.31832$js4.6571 / attbi_s51...
> Does anyone know of a Ruby source code obfuscator that's reliable and
> readily available?  If so, I'd appreciate a pointer to it (apparently,
both
> ruby-lang and rubygarden are down at the time of this posting so I can't
> check for myself.)
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Ken.
>
>