RE: protecting your php code from other peeping toms?

Why not formally license your scripts to your clients? Yes, they'll still have access to the source code, and yes, theoretically, someone could still copy it regardless of their license agreement, but if they sign or accept a clickwrap license agreement you would have legal recourse if you found out about it. You could put together as restrictive a license as you want. You could, theoretically, include a license restriction that forbids a client from touching so much as a blank space in your script... then do an MD5 checksum on the script file when you install it, and run a cron job to recheck the checksum every night; if it doesn't match the original, somebody's monkeyed with it. The script e-mails you, you make a nasty phone call to your client. Or I guess you could just check the file modification time for that matter. Harder to protect from copying, though, and I'm sure any solutions would be just as klunky. But it's important to remember that with proper licensing, releasing source code doesn't mean you don't own the copyright or 'Intellectual Property' any more, no matter what Microsoft would like you to believe. > -----Original Message----- > From: newsgrp@OneGeek.com [mailto:newsgrp@onegeek.com] > Subject: protecting your php code from other peeping toms? > > My question... I want to create some great php code and install it on web > sites for my clients. Now, this code is my property and I'd like > to keep it > that way. ::snip::: > Basically, I have a bunch of classes I want to secure. PHP is > plain text, a > nd that seems to be the insecure part about it. Well, if keeping your code secure isn't worth the cost of the Zend optimizer but you're determined to keep it hidden, then maybe PHP isn't the right tool to use. You could write CGI scripts in C, which would live on the server as compiled executables. Harder to learn, yes (It's definitely slow going for me compared to PHP), but no source code. -Andy