Firewall Install used JRuby to precompile our models and controllers; GitHub Enterprise uses code obfuscation with MRI.
Why didn't you choose to go the JRuby route again?
A lot of reasons, but the largest was that part of the big push for Enterprise was to mimic our github.com environment as much as possible. Every difference between the two is a real cost to support. A different Ruby interpreter definitely falls into the "big difference" category. :)
Curious then.. Do you run the obfuscator in production as well?
Nope, just in Enterprise.
How do you do the code obfuscation? rubyencoder or something homegrown?
It's written using Ruby on Rails and Erlang. My guess is that it's compiled or partially compiled. You can probably hack it and decompile it, but for all that work, you might as well just use an open source alternative.
And on the other side of the coin, why not release it as open source? I would be interested to know if they'd considered that. It works very well for Redhat.
What makes github great is the execution and the community, I think any decent team could clone Github as it's now given enough time.
They obfuscate with JRuby. Mingle, also a ruby based tool, does this too.