Your latest post seems to me far more appropriate to the very intelligent person 
that you are.  Seeing that you develop closed apps 9-5, you must therefore understand
that is sometimes necesary in order to feed your family.
As someone else noted, not all of us can mak a living from the royalties of on book,
like Larry has managed to do.
Myself, I write open source code 40 hours per week and make my living doing installation
and configuration of my software.  In the 13 years I've been coding, I've 
written precisely 3 proprietary apps.
The other hundereds of programs have been open source, even little utility programs
like this obfuscater that I write for my own use - as soon as I wrote it I
found a place to post the source for others to use.
I was then criticized for making my obfuscater available to you and others.

2 of the 3 programs that I have kept proprietary have been implementations of
new security methodologies that I have developed.  Given the precise nature 
of these two specific programs their utility is greatly enhanced by making
their operation non-obvious.  (That may not apply to a lot of security schemes, 
but in these two specific cases it's true.)
Both have also been methodologies that I have spent months developing and must
be paid for if I'm to pay my rent.  Specically, this script I'm obfuscating now
has taken me close to a year to develop. During that time my rent has gotten 3 
months past due.  If I'm to be around to develop anything, I have to have
users of this software pay for it.  That's reality.
These scripts are designed to let a company protect their confidential data.
If they want to save thousands or millions by using my software, I think 
it's reasonable to expect them to pony up $50 to help cover the cost of development.
It's also a fact that other companies have attempted to steal both of my
security technologies while my products were still in beta.
That's not a theory - that's hard reality for me.
My family is about to be homeless while some jerk is making big money stealing
my technology that I spent a year developing.
I don't intend to make that any easier than necesary.
It would be nice if everyone were trustworthy, but that's not reality.

So while you are taking a break from your full time job developing proprietary
software please don't spend that precious time criticizing me for giving away
my obfuscater.  I would perhaps be more receptive to your ideas of you actually
helped someone else by suggesting ways to obfuscate that one line, but if 
you are only here to stroke your own ego and show off then please share
your thoughts with your fellow full time proprietary coders around the office 
and not bother those of us who eek out a living giving our work away.

Ray

When I immediately responded it was to the query "help me obfuscate my source code so I can sell licenses". I haven't been at this for thirteen years - heck, I'm only twenty-six years old thus far and prior to being a (paid) programmer was all manner of retail clerk (and eventually a phone soliciter for a marketting company). I don't make my living and feed my family (two dogs, three cats and a roommate who is between jobs) by selling licenses and when I deal with obfuscated code on the job there is a distinct problem involved. When I go home and program its with a political bias which again leads me to deprecate closed or obfuscated source programs.

All this really means is that for both you, me and the average person involved in technology there is a social context to our questions. When people post questions that are supportive of spamming operations they tend to be removed or not responded. Similarly, there is a significant problem with closed and obfuscated source software and I'm sure you'll recognize the obvious bias inherent in asking a collection of open source programmers for help with keeping source code secret.

The general thrust here is that I'm willing to sympathize with you especially as I don't have to deal with competitors taking my code and selling it as their own (since I don't have competitors period (all the open source software I write is oriented toward GIS and database operations for political activism and in furtherance of democracy everything is available for free)).

I'll respond to your question later tonight or tomorrow. Just now my roommate wants me to come home so we can eat.

---

Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota

I must apologize for the tone of my last paragraph.
I'm sorry, it can be extremely frustrating when you've got an eviction notice
on your desk and someone suggests that you have no right to protect your
your work from wholesale theft.

Ray