> ...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

If that's the goal, why not use exerb with the ZLib option turned on? 
The resulting binaries can't be grepped for source.

Sure, all someone would need to do is a little reverse engineering on 
exerb to figure out how to extract the source, or simply have memorized 
what a ZLib header looks like, but seems to me it's a "reasonable 
barrier" for the purpose you're describing.

That said, it'd still be a great thing to have a general, more secure 
way of securing ruby source.  I'd like to be able to take advantage of 
it as well.

Jim Moy