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
