Hi, I am looking to release some plugins soon. I will charge for them and would like to know what the best way is to protect the source code. Can I just obvusicate it or is that fround upon? I just want to avoid that someone is handing the plugin to someone else who can use it without paying. thanks for any feedback.
Pretty much anything you do is reverse engineerable. But there is IonCube and base64_encode. At the end of the day all you can do is not worry too much about it and make sure you do enough to keep the innocent people from understanding your validation systems. Some might frown in non-open sourced. But what they think doesn't matter in this regard. But I bet you'll find that it's harder to update and troubleshoot your software on remote locations when the code is obfuscated. I used a key/email based license activation system with a callback to my host server. But at the end of the all this does is mitigate the risk; but pretty efficiently!
Ah, I have a database and a .php script, and the software uses curl to ping that .php script check the status of a license on activation and upgrades. I take different strategies with different plugins though.