Hello friends, I am planning to develop few scripts. Can you please give me ideas how I can i prevent illegal distribution of my scripts....? I know Zend is one solution (DARN this s**t is expensive $990) Any other ideas please...
Copyrighting will only protect you from those who openly and brazenly reverse engineer your scripts. The warez groups can do you more harm though so encryption and zending and obscufication would be the way to go in my opinion.
phplockit is the cheapest solution and you can lock the script to run on specific domain or IP. Hope this will help you to get started.
To be honest, I think that if you are truly concerned about people ripping off your scripts and you are building a business around selling them, then choose the best method irrespective of the cost. It is simply a cost of doing business. For my own part, I have chosen to go open source with most scripts that I write and closed source with programs that I write in C/C++. If I wanted to make money from them, I would probably go with a subcription model for some aspect of the project. For instance, I maintain an antispam project for Mercury32 mail servers. I have open sourced the code. But, I could switch the spam rule updates to a subscription service. Also, for closed source commercial projects, I would seriously consider coding in a compiled language instead of a scripted language. And, I would look into IP based licensing, whereby the program will not work at an IP address which is not associated with the license. It phones home periodically to confirm its status.