> Obviously most coders are in the middle ground. > They are not writing "the killer app of all time" > but is of significant value. I don't know what > people on here are charging but I can't add $2880 > a year to my overhead for the zend encoder. Plus > add $1875 per cpu for the zend accelerator for > each project.
My personal opinion is that your code is either worth "protecting" or it's not. If it's worth "protecting" then that protection comes at a price. Sorry, commercial reality time here. If you are going to operate on a commercial basis then you have commercial decisions to make. This is one of them. > So you're bidding for a project and the guy asks, > "Let me get this straight, you're charging me more > then everyone else and I won't be able to edit the > code?" I think you would simply pricing yourself > out of the market. If that's what you're going to do then yes. Ask yourself what people like ISC (the people who do bind and sendmail do to make a living - after all they have seriously commercial quality products available for free) or people like RedHat (who give away their linux distro for nix if you want to download it, or pay a small fee to whatever company downloads it and sells CD-R burns of the iso's). People can, and do, make money giving away their code. When you figure out how they are doing it, and the philosophy behind it, then maybe that will ease these fears. I can pretty much guarantee that if you come up with a "killer app" in php that no matter how protected it is you will not be the only one with a version of "killer app" for long. Someone else will come along and write something similar - if that person does it open source then there's also a fair chance it will end up being better than your product due to shear weight of numbers contributing to it. In the end all this, and more, are your decisions. Of course, if you choose not to do this commercially then it's a whole different setup with different goals and so on. For the record, I pretty much release what I do to anyone who wants it. Not that my efforts are of a standard that they are worth all that much per se - they are often fairly specific to the project at hand and not overly portable (in their released format). I do have one intranet application under development for my own business that may well end up with a strong commercial basis but it will never be a single product but part of a much larger package my business is currently planning. Even then, the code associated with that project may end up open sourced in some way. Let's face it, there's even a move to replicate the zend encoder in open source. As has already been said, there also has to be a level of trust between you and your client(s) if you are going to do business with them. If your clients see you as overly paranoid about your work they may end up not wanting to deal with you anyway. If you're that paranoid about losing control of your work offer it on a "complete solution" basis - either you host it on a machine that they have no "back end" access to or you provide the hardware as well as the software and have it locked out in such a way that the code is not easily "stolen". Although, even here you'll sooner or later be compromised I would think. CYA, Dave -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
