Re: Ethics question...

At 21:24 17/01/01 -0500, Shane McBride wrote:

I have spent a lot of time working on a specific E-Commerce (shopping-cart) to fill a need for a customer. Now that the project is complete, I would like to market the product, which is entirely PHP and MySQL. My question is: Is it ethical to sell a product ( at a relatively low-cost) written in PHP, especially since this group made it possible?

I guess that this is something that would be an issue for many people using mailing lists and/or newsgroups for help, and for all languages - not just PHP. I think that so long as you don't try and mislead the guys who'll potentially be helping you, for example by saying that it's a personal project, or for school, or for a charity site etc. then there aren't really any ethical problems with it - people who help don't do so out of any expectation of a material reward, just out of a desire to make life easier for others who are less experienced or are encountering problems. Sure, I'd be annoyed if I helped someone write 90% of his code and he then sold it, but when you're talking about people answering a few short questions in a forum like this, there's got to be an expectation on everyone's part that they're probably helping you with a commercial project. Of course I have no idea of your arrangement with this particular customer - I personally wouldn't bill a customer for the entire development of a product and then sell it to the public, but then again I like to sleep at night :)

If that's ok to do, does anyone have any ideas how I can put a time limit on a demo that isn't easily defeated?

Other than using an encoder/compiler I can't see any way of implementing it into the software. I guess it depends on how you'll be distributing the code - if you're going to be sending it directly to clients, then I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard for you to check their sites to see if they've deployed it without buying a licence.