Edit: I'm just going to ditch the idea of hiding anything. If some guy wants to beat me to the market, I guess that's what I'll have to live with. A lot of my code is already on the CPAN, so it would have only hidden the glue anyway. And at least I won't feel like a slimeball.

Edit: After using PAR for a bit over a week, I'm happy to have stopped using PDK. PAR is fantastic. PDK users should consider taking a look at it.

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I've been using ActiveState's PDK for years now. It's "great". "Great" meaning it's only kinda okay and really annoying. The last straw came flying at me when I wanted to upgrade to the newest PDK, version 8. I had previously been a subscriber to their subscription PDK, but I had let it expire. Now they will not allow me to renew it (they want full price). Last year I could afford it. This year, not so much.

Unfortunately, I have to build a binary that is reasonably protected from intrusion. In the future, I intend to GPL the code that I'm writing, but I'm not ready to do that immediately. I'd like to have a chance at marketing it before someone else takes it and beats me to it. I hate that logic very much. I know about licensing and all that, but I don't have any legal team to speak of and can't honestly use that to protect my code for the moment. I'm sure to hear flack about this particular part of my post. I already know how dumb it is, so please spare me on this if at all possible. Also, the code is Perl and won't be C or anything else, so please don't suggest rewriting it in some other language.

Is there anything that is not an ActiveState product that can do a reasonable job? I'm already using a large amount of obfuscation techniques since the PDK is definitely not "secure" with regard to access to the packaged code.

I guess I should ask more clearly: does something like PAR::Packer (with PAR::Filter::Crypto) package the code in a "reasonable" way or is it trivial to get at the code?

Yes, I hate myself for asking. Thanks for any help you can give me.