Zend Store?

Anon

Has anyone seen Zend Store already? damn... that's just freaking ridiculous... Subscription plans? What the hell is this? Who are they targeting?? Fortune 1000 corporations? I went there this morning having my credit card ready thinking that people who support PHP would understand that most of their users appreciate the word "FREE" and that $6,000 for encoder goes beong any limits of imagination. I'd rather shoot myself in the leg before Zend will see me as their customer (unless they get some brains in place and fix their prices).

Anyhow, I can go on about this forever, what do you think?

dcomartin

To be honest I was a bit shocked at the prices. I thought that most of the prices would be pretty reasonable but, just in my opinion I thought they were a bit too high. I was truely concidering the encoder until I see the price.

Anon

Zend Encoder Unlimited™ Test Drive

When you take a free test drive of the Zend Encoder Unlimited, you'll receive the full version of our product for a 30-day period.

Click the "Test drive available" button below to begin your free 30-day test drive. You will be directed to the Pickup Depot, where the Zend Encoder Unlimited will appear.

In order to load encoded files, you must have the Zend Optimizer™ installed.

(taken from zend.com store)

At least you are allowed to try it for FREE 🙂

Anon

heh, yeah... I don't know about you, but I'm not even gonna bother looking at it... for 6 larges i'd rather get a car or something...

the thing that pisses me off mostly is that they ask us to pay for TRIAL version of their software... it's even more insane than Apple asking money for beta of OSX...

I can see it all clear now...

--- >

Marketing Position Available as Zend Tech. Key requirement: must be an idiot.

Anon

they ask us to pay for TRIAL version of their software.

Trial is free. Check on the site. Also, there's Encoder SE which consts much less than $6000.

chrisnewman

Is the Zend Encoder anything more than half of the optimizer, which is free ?

Anon

eh... encoder yes, but development package - NO, see

http://www.zend.com/store/products/trial-agreement.php

it's like 100 bucks for 30-day trial...

Anon

no, encoder is much like Java thing, it compiles your code and saves compiled code in a file which you can run later... it allows you to hide the code and to increase performance...

if i'm wrong somewhere, correct me please

btanner

I think the prices are actually not to bad. Let me explain why:

The full encoder is expensive, yes. But consider this. You can still develop PHP the way you always have, nothing has changed.

Keeping the encoder price high encourages the open source movement. Small, independent developers who design helpful classes, write tutorials, try new things, push the envelope, etc, have no incentive to encode their work and try and sell it -- its not worth it. This preserves the open source movement and helps us all to learn from each other. If the encoder was free, every Tom, Dick, and Harry new to the movement would be encoding every piece of work they did and we would never learn anything except by buying expensive books and taking courses.

But, bigger companies, who are trying to mass market a total package, don't have to worry about having their code ripped off, hacked, and resold from under their noses. Some software packages for the web cost tens and hundredes of thousands of dollars. Some even cost millions. Asking $6000 for a reliable protection of that investment is not unreasonable.

The point here is that if your business cannot afford $6000 -- then you don't really need the encoder.

Same deal with the development package. Non commercial license includes the IDE and Launchpad -- and its $50 a year.

If you are a commercial developer, I believe its reasonable to expect that you can afford $70 a month for access to these developer tools.

Is anybody with me on this? I just bought a non-commercial license and am about to check out the IDE.

Gimme some feedback.

Anon

You are mixing two things. There is \"encoder test drive\", which allows you to use encoder for free for 30 days. Go to encoder pages and press \"test drive\" there.

And there\'s a 30-day trial subscription, that costs money, because it\'s a real subscription with real products. It\'s short-term, thus called trial.

Anon

Yes, it is. It makes your PHP files non-readable by third party.

Anon

Brian wrote:

But, bigger companies, who are trying to mass market a total package, don't have to worry about having their code ripped off, hacked, and resold from under their noses. --------------------------------

of course not, but lets assume for a second that I'm that very Tom who spent last year writing a small app (forum, advertising system, whatever) and I wanna sell it now for 50 bucks/license... what about me? i wanna hide my code too and make app run faster...

And for home users, paying 50 bucks a year? for what? i wan using notepad for free for the last two years and i'm gonna be just fine for the next few...

Anon

yeah, but TRIAL means FREE try out

btanner

This is what I am getting at.

People who are trying to sell products for $50 really shouldn't be encoding it. The great thing about PHP and the reason its so popular is because there are so many free scripts available. If the encoder was cheaper, EVERYONE would be encoding their scripts and wanting $50 for them -- this would lead to the quality of the FREE scripts going way down, and ultimately would be bad for PHP.

Look at PERL. Before PHP, almost all server side scripting was done in PERL. You can't encode a PERL file, look how long they got along with no problems. This goes to show that you can still sell non-encoded software, just not on a huge scale. If you find you are doing enough sales -- I am sure you can then afford the encoder.

The $50 is for the IDE mostly. Its actually not that good. Its java based and pretty slow. But you CAN trace through your programs, check variable values as your program executes (I think), and it auto-completes some tags and stuff. I've been waiting for this kind of product for PHP, its a great time saver.

I used notepad up to a week ago as well, when I discovered ultraedit (www.ultraedit.com).

You can download the PHP template (wordfile) so that it highlights different parts of your code different ways. It also lets you have multiple documents open at once, and shows you what has been saved, what has not, etc. Real time saver, check it out.

Anon

Well, if notepad is enough for you, you obviously shouldn't waste $50. But there are people that Notepad is not enough for them. 🙂

Anon

it's not $50 bucks, it's $50 bucks EACH YEAR... or am I missing something? :\

lawnmowerman

Regarding this quote:

The point here is that if your business cannot afford $6000 -- then you don't really need the encoder.

What if I am an individual trying to protect myself? According to many of the companies and individuals in my area, the majority of money to be made from software is maintenence agreements. Software can be stolen, true, but if something is broken and you want it fixed, you're going to pay for it.

I have personally developed several unique utilities that noone else (company or individual) is offering that I can tell. I would like to be able to sell the rights to use this software to companies for a relatively low cost, but charge for support, upgrades, etc on a yearly basis.

Don't get me wrong, I support open source and "free software", but the encoder is not intended for these arenas. The encoder is intended for use as I intend to use it.

With the inexpensive purchase/support model I would like to employ, I cannot justify paying $6000 for a full license.

Luckily, Zend has opted to release the Subscription Edition, which allows me to pass the cost of the encoder on to my customers. Though the detail on exactly how this works is very vague.

Does the "5 Pack" allow you to distribute your encoded script to 5 servers with unlimited connections or does this pack limit you to 5 connections and a single server?

My $0.02 🙂

-Rich

gauss

Hi there,

in my opinion Zend is right. We are an ISP and Web-Application provider. We could effort the $6000 for the encoder when I have the customers for it. But what I hate about it are the monthly fees for the IDE.
I have no problem paying for software once, but it sucks when I have to pay $70 every month for one IDE client license.

Anon

I also think $70 per month for an IDE is expensive.

The problem also is you pay 1 year up front, but if you don't like the IDE after a couple of months, are you out the entire year's subscription price? I couldn't find this out at the Zend store.

Bruce

Anon

Rich, each Encoder Runtime license allows you to run encoded files on one server. There's no limits on what the server does (connections, etc.).
Generally, you can ask all those questions on info@zend.com.