Protect your PHP

[a_bertrand]

I smiled when I saw some guys here on MWG saying that he would protect his script before selling them. I have a bad news for him. As PHP is not compiled, and that most people want to be able to dig inside the code, you will not be able to protect anything as any kind of protection can simply be removed from the script. That is, unless you encode your script or use some soft like zend safeguard. Yet if you use those, your script is not anymore modifiable... So basically useless in case of an engine.

So how can you protect yourself? Well... there is a couple of things to think about:

- If your script is pirated do you really lose money? I would tend to say it is not sure, as maybe the guy using the pirated version would anyhow NOT buy your script. So you don't lose anything.

- Actually pirated softs tend to increase the market as more people use it, that means more mods or more people knowing it, which ends up by more people buying your script in the long run. Of course you may think I'm mad but think carefully, would windows be so popular without having be so much pirated before? I doubt.

- The time you spend on making a software pirate proof doesn't remove time from development? And as the answer is yes, does it really make sense for your real customers? The answer is no, it hurts real customers without really affecting people which don't want to buy a license.

- Happy customers will be generally good customers which will avoid to share their code with others... so that could block pirated version from the fact that your customers are happy and don't want to kill you... maybe I'm a bit over optimistic here ;)

Does that mean there is no way to protect yourself? No I didn't said that, and I hope I will come with a creative and yet relatively good compromise for my own engine, but I will not share all my ideas here, you shall see them later on live.

But please let me know your own ideas / feeling of the question.