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in reply to Re: Re: Closing Perl Source
in thread Closing Perl Source

I'll admit that at some early point in time, I too had wanted to "close" a perl-oriented script/program. I did the foresight of reading other people's attempts and saw that it wasn't a really good idea and if I wanted anything "closed", to just write it in C, even though good usage of strings and decompilers can get most of it out. Since then, I've never hid/closed anything I've written and I have gotten much more positive responses on all things I've ever written from those in the open source community. I even provide the source for things written in C, documentation and all.

Bottom line, just share it. You'll find that the responses you'll get are much more open and helpful than if you try to "hide" an interpreted-language-oriented script.

It's like the guy that wanted to write all of his shell scripts in perl. Everything on the system that ran in /bin/sh was converted to /usr/bin/perl...which promptly failed because /usr isn't mounted at boot time and hence, no perl binary is available. Just because it sounds like a good idea, doesn't mean it's anywhere near a good idea.