What I've seen regularly is that when commercial (as in, to sell for profit) products are being implemented in Perl, then the Perl community should come up with some magic for free. Disregarding the discussion about the pros and cons of obfuscating the source, I think that's a pretty lame attitude. You have quite a wishlist, and I think the second one (I don't want to write one myself) is offensive. Perlmonks (IMO) is about people who try to help themselves, and not a "Do my assignment for me, for free" forum.

Apparently, you don't want to do what management asked of you. There some things that you can do:

• Let management hire someone to do this assignment
• Convince management to spend some money on a commercial obfuscator. After all, they expect to make money on the product, and often, you have to invest some money before you can reap the benefits. They probably already saved a lot of money by using Perl and CPAN

The one thing you shouldn't do is to ask for a free solution to a problem which you don't want to solve yourself, and is highly controversial anyway.

Arjen