ruby-on-rails - 跟踪 Web/Intranet 上的 Rails 应用程序使用情况

Question

我们在 LGPL 许可下开发了一个开源 Web 应用程序，并托管在 LIVE 演示服务器中。源代码也可以在 source forge 中找到。每天都会通知大量下载。因此，我们想跟踪该应用在网络上的实时使用情况，以了解实时用户的数量。

Rails 中是否有任何方法可以跟踪此应用程序在连接到 Internet 的系统中的配置和使用情况？信息丰富的答案将帮助我们在我们的应用程序中找出或开发这样一种方法，如果我们将来将该产品作为商业产品，这肯定会帮助我们阻止盗版。

谢谢 ：）-

Answer 1

Your question is really two questions:

1. How can I see how popular my application is?

   • You can look at the download counts. Not foolproof because people might download from each other, and you'll miss them.

   • Crawl the web and see how many sites respond with your app's signature. Takes massive resources, plus you won't catch the ones that modified your code, and false positives from people spoofing your app's signature.

   • Make the app call home. Again, since people can just take out the code that does this, not foolproof.

2. How can I make sure no one can pirate my app?

   • Your source code is free, so... you can't.

How does it make sense to be "selling" an open source app? Better to sell support.

Also, since you're using ruby, you'll have to use a compiler to produce a binary in order to avoid giving away your source code (as per the MIT license, which rails is released under).

A quick googling shows that some may exist, but making sure you produce a binary that works is going to take a lot of resources. So, there is a significant legal/technical barrier to keeping your source code closed. (Also, decompilers could easily be used to reverse engineer your app.)