RE: [PHP] Genus who came up with "Self Destruct Code" & "Copy Pro tection"

> But what if you sell a product and you want to keep control > of the copies? How can contracts help you if you don't even > know who actually uses the product and how many copies of it? I guess that depends on how you want to do things. Keep in mind that your great <whatever project> probably has free equivalents. Why will someone pay for yours when they can download an equivalent one for free? The answer for that would, I presume, be your ability to customise that product to the clients' requirements. In that case, you're not really selling the code anyway, you're selling your services to make it work in the client's environment. This is how companies like RedHat, ISC and others work. They give the code away for free (yes, ISC has a 'commercial' version for some of their programs with added features but the theory remains) and sell value added services. No matter how good my web bulletin board/discussion board system is there are many free alternatives that are probably just as (or nearly so) good. All that is required is to have them customised for a particular environment. I suspect it's worth deciding what you're selling as that will let you figure out what you need to protect. CYA, Dave