I am a Ruby on Rails developer. I specialise in Point of Sale Systems. Recently, one of my customers found a way to copy my app with the DB structure and shared the app amongst his friends(theft/piracy).

How can I safeguard my app from being copied/duplicated/stollen? Can I compile my rails app so as to hide the source code?

I was also thinking about use a MAC address as one of the app sessions. This any developer can take out of the code. I thought of not installing MySQL Workbench so as to hide DB Structure, but anyone can reinstall it. What can I do secure my Rails app?

CodePudding user response：

You don't distribute it as an on premises solution. You offer it as SaaS, on your own servers or the cloud.

If they only have access through the browser, they don't have access to the code and cannot copy it.

If the app is running on something they have access to, it's already lost. You can try to mitigate it through a confidentiality agreement or other contract, but that is going to be difficult to prove and enforce.