I'm sympathetic to the open source movement too, but like all philosphies, it can't apply equally well to all situations. Some folks still have a need to hide their code, protect their recorded music, or whatever. In fact, it's still true that a lot more families are being fed on old-style closed code than open code, I'd bet...
That said (this is a bit off-topic, besides that nice seque), I still try to avoid sending money to Microsoft and the other major closed code companies. That's one of the reasons (along with cheapness) that I can't see using the ActiveState Komodo, Perl Studio, etc. products. I've used Perl Builder in the past, but have recently paid $30 for sharewire EditPlus. (Note to the never-pay-for-anything crowd: it doesn't expire, it just nags you beyond the expiration :-) ). It's a pretty nice simple product, that also handles C, HTML, and Java syntax, is extensible, etc. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Greg London Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 1:05 PM To: Mark Aisenberg Cc: mongers of perl Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] obfuscation/compiler/summary Mark Aisenberg wrote: > I'm surprised that someone hasn't released a module > to auto-obfuscate. I guess it shows that not many > people are using Perl to generate distributable > commercial applications. Or maybe it shows that people > know that obfuscation is not good security, and that > we need a true Perl compiler instead. obfuscator cost: lots of time to get it right obfuscator benefit: possibly prevents some unauthorized copying. So it takes time/money to make it, but there is no direct benefit of additional income, just a more ethereal benefit of preventing possible lost income. Secondly, it isn't perfect security, and all it takes is one hacker and an internet connection to completely disable it for the consuming public, and then all benefit is lost. Thirdly, given the number of low-level flame emails that I recieved when I asked about the obfuscator in the first place, there appears to be a dogma among some who traffic in the Open Source community that Open Source is the only legitimate and ethical way to make a living as a programmer. Proprietary software apparently is the Evil Empire. Therefore, of those who could write a perl obfuscator, a number of them believe that such a program is immoral, and therefore would not write one. A true compiler, on the other hand, would have the benefit of speeding up execution, which is a gain whether or not anyone de-obfuscates your software. The "Proprietary is Evil" crowd would more likely support a compiler, because of its performance improvements, so you'll likely see a real compiler long before you see a decent obfuscator. Perl 6 is supposed to compile down to C. but no one's mentioned an obfuscation mode. Oh, I just tried the ActiveState debugger that came with the PDK 4.0, very nice GUI. Greg
