How to protect Perl code

[Alex Agerholm]

Hi,

Can anyone give me a good way to protect my Perl code.
I am writing a CGI application in Perl that I am going to sell - therefore I
would like to protect my code in such a way that it is not that easy to copy
the code and reuse/resell/distribute it.
Does anyone have a good sugestion howto do this ?

Regards
Alex

[Fliptop]

On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 at 20:33, Alex Agerholm opined:

AA:Can anyone give me a good way to protect my Perl code. I am writing a
AA:CGI application in Perl that I am going to sell - therefore I would
AA:like to protect my code in such a way that it is not that easy to copy
AA:the code and reuse/resell/distribute it. Does anyone have a good
AA:sugestion howto do this ?

a google search on 'hiding perl code' gave me almost 25,000 hits. this
topic has been discussed to death on several perl lists.

[Aaron Baugher]

al...@fam-agerholm.dk (Alex Agerholm) writes:

It can't be done. You can obfuscate your code, but you can't prevent
someone from reading it. Perl is a scripting language. At some
point, your script has to be read by the perl interpreter, and if a
user's perl can read it, so can he if he really wants to.

There are compilers which turn a perl script into some sort of binary
code, which would make it somewhat more difficult (but not impossible)
to read, but that does nothing at all to prevent copying.

--
Aaron
abau...@esc.pike.il.us