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.
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