Unlike other products, though, your end-user is free to muck about with it.

About the biggest difference between Perl and "other products" in this regard, is Perl does less to maintain the illusion of protection. The bottom line is, anything you give someone to run on their computer can be mucked about with. Granted, most folks won't have the tuits to break out a decompiler, or debugger, or whatever... but the opportunity is there for the taking.

I would go so far as to say about the only fool-proof way to keep your program secret is to not let people run it on their computer. Web applications are an excellent way to accomplish this. As things go, without knowing much about it specifically, I would presume PerlApp (along with other "Perl compilers") is probably one of the least effective ways to keep your program secret, short of giving out plain-text source.

I think most experienced Perl programmers realize this, and stop trying to fight it. If you make a great product, and provide good service to go along with it, that effort stands on its own.

PS: I second duff's recommendation. There is no such thing as PERL; only Perl and perl. People sometimes call it the "Practical Extracting and Reporting Language," but as far as we know this is a retronym, and was coined after the name was already chosen.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Win32 binary (and extensible) OO-perl applications by revdiablo
in thread Win32 binary (and extensible) OO-perl applications by dpmott

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