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I had a question with regards to software built on Ruby on Rails. I'm on the business end of an incubation team that has a few projects in the works, all built on Ruby on Rails. The goal from the investor was to sell the software out to third parties and have them use the platforms to their liking. From what I can tell though, there is no way to compile Ruby code and send it off to a third party, hiding the actual code from them.

We do not want our clients being able to copy our code and take it from us. Is there any actual solution to this problem, or are we screwed because they already decided to develop on Ruby? We wanted to be able to sell software as a service, but that's not going to work out if a client can sign up for a month, copy our code, and then build their own solution.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Micah
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Ruby code obfuscators do exist, but that's of little real help IMO. But even if Ruby was compiled, chances are good it would get compiled into a format that is easily decompiled. Languages like C# and Java are both easily decompiled and thus source code is easy to get at these days.

Your real protection should probably come from a license. You may need to work with a lawyer or someone versed in software licenses. But if they violate your license, you have legal ground to take action.

Matt Greer
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