If its against the spirit of ruby then it makes it less commercially 
useable since code can't be distributed in a closed way. I do hear a lot 
of resistance to encrypted ruby cos people are just self hosting app's 
which is fine, but...

Encryption would offer quite a bit of protection, you could hide a key 
well, not impossible to find but enough to make it easier to write the 
app from scratch than go to the trouble of steeling source code.
:)
Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> On 5/22/06, Kris Leech <krisleech / interkonect.com> wrote:
>> I found a one page html page detailing how to decrypt a CIL back to
>> source like you can with Java bytecode... Its just too easy to do!
>> Getting a key out of binary can be made to be difficult, not impossible.
>> With bytecode its just all to easy.
>> REally we need encrypted ruby code, but there seems to be resistance to
>> the idea in the ruby community...
> 
> In some sense I suppose encrypting code is against the spirit of Ruby,
> but from my perspective the problem is more of practicality. The basic
> issue is that if the computer can decrypt the code to run it, then
> someone else can as well. You will have to embed the key somewhere in
> the binary, and it would be trivial to run the interpreter in a
> debugger to see where the key was hidden.
> 
> This is the same problem big media is running against with their
> incessant and obsessive fight against supposed "copyright
> infringement" with DRM technologies. At some point the data has to be
> unencrypted for humans to see, read or hear it. Unless of course we
> all have special chips embedded in our brains that allow us to only
> see or hear content specifically licensed to us. That is the next
> logical step. Be prepared for the introduction to Congress of the
> Omnibus Verifying Entertainment Revenue with Licensing Or Restriction
> of Data Act (aka the OVERLORD Act) sometime in 2008. Your chip awaits.
> </end_copyright_tirade>
> 
> Ryan


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