[Rubycocoa-talk] [Slightly OT] Licensing

[Tim P. <he...@ti...>]

Hey all

Firstly, I apologize that in this post I ramble on a bit, but please  
bear with it :)

I've been thinking about ruby latly, and how people cope with  
releasing live, production code, in a commercial manner that protects  
systems (and code) from abuse. We all are probally well aware that  
languages that can be compiled (java etc etc) can be un-compiled, so  
things like Ruby2C are still vulnerable to de-compilation techniques.  
Which then led me onto to think, well, if anything that can be  
compiled can be un-compiled, compilation as a method of protection of  
the code base is fairly pointless; as is obfuscation of code (as it  
can be tidied very simply).

So then, a kind of licensing scheme would probably be the best method  
to protect commercial systems from abuse? Whilst no license key  
encryption is impregnable - as I write this i believe 512bit can be  
factored fairly easily, and the security of 768bit is questionable,  
leaving only 1024 bit with any kind of industrial strength - it would  
seriously hamper most would-be-attackers would it not? I just  
wondered how (if at all) anyone had dealt with managing there ruby  
systems licensing and how they had gone about it considering the code  
base is easily readable? In our RC apps all one need do is browse  
into Contents/Resources and the source files are free for all to see.

I was just intrigued to see how people, if anyone, had either thought  
or implemented anything like this for an RC app, or even a rails app  
for that matter? I read this article with interest:

http://macromates.com/sigpipe/2004/09/05/using-openssl-for-license-keys/

I totally understand that NO system would ever be safe, as there is  
always someone who has either (or both) the inclination and/or time  
to hack it.

Apologies that this is slightly OT, but everyone on this forum seems  
to have a pretty wide ranging experience with ruby and was just  
wondering...

Cheers

Tim