Can You Answer This Question?

TraNz

Everybody that I have asked this question is telling me it cant be done. Here is a little story.

My company just acquired another company that had been giving away an application wirtten in PHP. The code was not encoded but did have copyright notices all over it. Well, we know this wont stop everybody. This code did not fall under the GPL.

So, since we have bought the company our plans are this, to encode the application using IonCube as it doesnt require anything to be installed on the server. Release this as a new version.

Some people will of course be upset that they can no longer gain access to the source code and will uninstall and reinstall the previous version.

My question is this.
How can I prevent the user from reinstalling the previous version of the unencoded code. Upon install tables are created ect. Can I do this by having the next release have a call back to the server? Change the table names? Ect. What do you people in the PHP community feel would be the best solution?

We are also looking for people that know php like the back of their hand and are willing to write modules and get paid for them.

Thanks for the help.

LordShryku

Everybody was right. If the source code was once available, someone will always have it, Mr. Gates

I think the real problem you guys should be worrying about is: Now that you guys are going to make this proprietary, what's to stop someone from taking your old code, and releasing a GPL'ed version?

TraNz

All in all nothing. We knew that going into it. There is other code that we wanted that was released to the public.

The best thing we could do is try and squash it as best as possible.

drawmack

You do not control their server. Therefor no matter what your install program does to prevent a roll back to the previous version it can be undone and anyone with half a brain cell installs the new version in a temporary location first anyway.

TraNz

yeah, thats what I thought. Well, we can put the new encoded version out there and go from there.

BTW, We are looking at using IonCube vs. Zend. I understand this is personal prefrence in some cases, what would you guys suggest?