Licence Your Scripts - What do you use?

I am wondering what the best tools are to protect my scripts and to limit the use to a set number of domains.
I looked at ioncube but it's not that I want to encode my script totally (except the licence part) and the price of $299 for the encoder and $129 for a licence generator is a bit steep imho

Edwin

 

Try phpauidt.

http://solidphp.com/products/phpaudit/index.php

 

Looks good. will give the free version a try to see if it's what i had in mind
Thanks

 

If your looking for an encoder i have built a php encoder of my own that uses "zend like" encryption.

 

Hi Edwin

You may have misunderstood the pricing as $299 for an ionCube Pro license and this includes the license generator. In fact, if purchasing a license for the Windows Encoder then this comes with a license generator for Windows and for Linux, so you could encode on Windows and generate license files from a Linux server if you wished, which is great for automating license file creation! You probably got $129 from the price for an additional Encoder license, but you almost certainly wouldn't need that.

Also, if you're prepared to do a bit of coding, you could always buy an entry level encoding tool be it ionCube or something else, that doesn't have native licensing, and then create a PHP file that implements license restrictions yourself. You would encode that for each customer, and in effect such a PHP file would become your license file. A potential weakness to note with that approach is that licensing systems would generally test the global variable $_SERVER, and if the testing is performed in a PHP script, the entries in $_SERVER could be poked with false values before being tested by a prepend script or in any other PHP script that happened to run before the testing. Systems that implement the checking in an extension, such as Zend Optimiser and the ionCube Loader, would do the testing of $_SERVER before any PHP scripts run, so it would be harder to cheat. But in practice it's unlikely that many would try and fiddle $_SERVER so a PHP based licensing script could be pretty effective. Just depends whether you want to save a bit and craft your own solution (or use PHPAudit for example), or pay a bit more on the encoding tool to get native licensing features.

 

That's maybe not such a bad idea...
I could build a system on my server and have the licence function encoded in the script with an other critical function. That could be a few dozen lines and i saw that you (ioncube ) charge about $1 for that if i use the online coder