Some of you may remember with a warm glow the mildly heated conversation over Here is a commercial obfuscator.

I recalled it when the topic of Stunnix's Perl-obfu came up on a ruby list - so I dug it out as an amusing reference (and so people would realise that not all Perl folk think obfu-ing real code is sane.)

On re-reading I was somewhat surprised to see every anti-Stunnix node had a heavily negative reputation, and every pro-Stunnix node had a positive reputation. I think you can tell from the posts why I was surprised.

A quick supersearch on nodes that mention Stunnix show similar odd results:

• Perl web server
• Stunnix Perl Web Server - a platform for portable browser-based applications
• Obfuscating method calls
• B::Deobfuscate - New version - 0.03
• B::Deobfuscate - Deobfuscates symbol names
• Closing Perl Source

Now of course there could be a large silent majority voting who think massively overpriced commercial Perl obfu services are a good thing.

Alternatively there could be somebody who felt so slighted by the nodes in question they want to the trouble of writing some web bots to do a little corrective voting.

I have to admit to being mildly amused ;-)