Simon Cozens wrote: > > Mark Aisenberg: > > I guess it shows that not many > > people are using Perl to generate distributable > > commercial applications. > > That's making the tacit assumption that if you're writing a > distributable commercial application, you need to hide the source code. > Which is a very odd assumption, if you look at it closely - you're > obviously not interested in hiding the source from people who are going > to abide by your license terms, and people who aren't going to abide by > your license are going to break your obfuscation anyway...
you're implying that the abiders and non-abiders are fixed in number and are independent of the level of difficulty in de-obfuscating. I believe there are those who are non-abiders if you leave the front door open but will abide if it is deadbolted. so obfuscation can have its benefits, barring a publicly available crack. security codes and shareware story: these guys obfuscate a unique version of the software for each person who downloads the free version. the customers need to pay to get their license code which unlocks the full features of the program. otherwise it disables itself after 30 days. <http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/cgi-bin/ubb/newsdisplay.cgi?action=topics&number=14&article=000052> "Out of the 194 different hosts that tried to renew a license code, 107 of them sent in pirated codes" Greg
