Re: Protecting Commercial PHP Scripts

Nick Wilson wrote:

* and then Francisco M. Marzoa Alonso declared....

I was wondering if anyone might have suggestions or useful links on protecting commercial php scripts. I am about to design a system that would be pretty valuable in a very niche market and would not wish the script to be passed on to others once downloaded.

There's no way to protect the code from copying. The only way to do that is not to give no one the code, provide the service based on the code instead of the code itself. Dont waste your time looking for a solution for a lost battle. It's just an advice, of course.

I've had about 5 off list (why so many today?) telling me about zend encoder so that would seem not to be true. AFAIK Zend Encoder is used to protect from reverse engineering, not from copying. The only thing it does is to produce a binary program as a compiler avoiding than the final users can easily view or modify the source code, but the users can still copy those binary files.

In the real world (tm) there's no effective protection for this kind of things. All "inviolable protections" for programs has been broken sooner than later since the first computer program code has been closed to today, even those based on hardware artifacts (as port-key devices).

Thankyou all, i will check out the links, and especially the zend encoder page ;-)