Re: [PHP4BETA] Byte-coding or protecting

: While I certainly am a huge booster of open source, and hope to be So am I! : placing about 10 PHP-related packates into the public domain in the : coming year (once PHP4 settles down), I see no point in getting : doctrinaire about the uses to which people will put PHP. This issue : of open/proprietary comes up again and again. The point ought to be : to get people using PHP and producing useful applications, and if that : means enabling some non-open application to be written, so be it. : There will still be a ton of useful open source work available, and : if there is a compellingly useful piece of proprietary software written, : you can bet that an open source version of it will become available in : time. In a certain sense, the proprietary code folks are always : fighting a losing battle, in which the best they can hope for is a small : amount of time to make money until a freebie version of their product : appears. So although I plan to stay on the "open source" side of the : fence, I think we all have better things to do than argue with a : minority of commercially minded folk who want to keep their work : secret. Let them. If they come up with some clever general ideas, : it still contributes to the overall advancements of creating good open : source PHP applications... If you're hired to do some work, wouldn't you charge for it? I mean you have to work on someone's specifications in a time period, which is truly a commercial work! And you wouldn't like that person to sell copies of that software, would you? You are in favour of open-source, so you'll understand well what it feels like when somebody copies your code and replaces all the occurences of your name with his own and probably sell the copy..... I don't know about you, but I go .......... and all I wanted is to make sure that no further copies can be sold, since I could restrict the program to specific host and it will deny execution if its some other host. I don't see anything wrong in it. Thats it. Thank you! Faisal