Open Source Ideas and Dogmas?

van__

Seems a lot of the developers in the PHP community (myself included) are Open Source advocates who believe in the notion of sharing information.

A common method of information distribution is via the GPL, which states that all software which make use of the information available must in themselves be made freely available under the GPL as well.

In essence, this is a viral license since all code that makes use of the 'infected' code must be made 'infected' as well.

I mean 'infected' in the sense that the license in itself tries to force all developers who make use of code under that license to place their software under that license as well. And thus, spreads as a virus would, via contact.

Not that being 'infected' is a bad thing.
And the FSF also has the LGPL which does not require the software which makes use of a LGPL'd library to be under any license at all.

Now...
PHP is no longer under the GPL (since version 4) so code that is created with PHP is no longer needing to be applied the GPL unless the developer so chooses.

And in accordance, Zend has released the Zend Encoder and other proprietary tools to distribute PHP sources as encrypted binaries, so as to allow developers to 'close source' their work.

And thus my issue:
I've seen quite a sharply negative response towards developers who would use the Zend Encoder or other means of 'close sourcing' their work. The main reason implied seems to be that PHP developers have the notion that PHP is open source. When in fact it's not. Yes, the codebase for the PHP engine is available, but is under it's own license and that license does not cover any dirivetive works in anyway.

Personally, I am strongly toying with the idea of using the Zend Encoder on some of my projects.

Why?
Well, I took the time to spend several months creating a complete portal framework that can handle multiple sites concurrantly, limited only by the ability of the webserver. So, one copy per CPU could serve say 50 sites at once.

I beleive that this is worth some money, and I'm not eager to just throw this code out into the wild to let whoever wants to use and toy with it do so.

There are a number of reasons for this:
1) I have other applications I would like to extend it with first.

2) The software is completely customizable via .ini files and each site that uses it just creates their own extensions. So they don't need to see my code anyway, they just need the documentation on usage of the API.

3) I need to make more money off it, 2 licenses have been purchased before it's beta launch and I would like to sell a few more to ensure a profit and fund future development.

4) I would rather not see a different version of my own software competing with mine untill I have established a significant user base and more service applications.

So what do you make of this?
I'm looking for input on this subject since I've been trying to figure out a good roadmap for a GPL release, since I do at some point in time plan on opening it up and sharing the code for others to use freely via an online CVS project.

Ideas anyone?

[deleted]

"Ideas anyone?"

Go for it, use the encoder. If that can help you make more money, good for you! :-)

Just two points:

1: You'll have to support what you sell, which is a lot easier with 2 customers than with 200

2: You're not the only portal developer, the advantage you have over the competition now will be gone in a few months. (for ex: there's nothing you have done that I can't reproduce, especially with the ease of PHP) If one of your customers becomes 'php-aware' chances are they will drop your 'expensive' product and start building their own 'free' copy.

All in all you need one heck of a good app to be able to succesfully sell it and keep selling it.

Once you have that then using the encoder is ofcourse justified. (just as justified as paying for the use of PHP for that matter, you're making money off a product you did not have to pay for, but which a bunch of people spent a lot of time developing. Sounds just as un-fair as people stealing your portals code)

Go for it, hope it works out!

brandonschnell

if i use a gpl'd text editor to create a document is that document now under the GPL license? No.

you would only need to distribute code under GPL if a portion of your code was borrowed from a project that was licensed using GPL. In effect this is saying if you borrow my code you're going to share yours. Write your own code and do whatever you want with it and put it under any license you want.

developers get annoyed at programs distributed using Zend Encoder when they can't customize or update the program like they want. if you do distribute a program using Zend Encoder make sure the users understand this, and be prepared to play technical support.

after a developer gets frustrated from not being able to update your program (bug/customizations/etc), don't be surprised when you see a GPL competitor.

van__

vincent wrote:

"Ideas anyone?"

Go for it, use the encoder. If that can help you make more money, good for you! :-)

Just two points:

1: You'll have to support what you sell, which is a lot easier with 2 customers than with 200

All in all you need one heck of a good app to be able to succesfully sell it and keep selling it.

Hey good points.

Oh, ya I'm very aware that there are quite a few portals out there.

And no, I'm probably never going to retail this product since I don't feel like providing customer suport to non-clients.
Basically, this is offered to my clients for their enterprise apps, and it allows me to better service them since I can upgrade all their software simultaneously, as well as test for backwards compatability for their sites while developing, which is nice.

Basically, the portal is my engine for a data beutique.. which is what I am.

And actually, I'm moving out of the HTML domain and into realtime data services. And the portal will be acting as the back end to that.

There is a lot more to come with this, but I will not go into details since that stuff is still under wraps.

...but it's that other stuff that really makes me want to be greedy with my code till I have all the service architectures online.

van__

More good points

Brandon Schnell wrote:

if i use a gpl'd text editor to create a document is that document now under the GPL license? No.

I never implied that, I did mention that some people thought that PHP had some sort of Open Source mandate, but said that was never the case.

now onto the meat:

after a developer gets frustrated from not being able to update your program (bug/customizations/etc), don't be surprised when you see a GPL competitor.

Well as I said in my original post,
my software and the software that actually generates the output are abstracted from one another. Do you need the PHP engines source to write PHP? Hell no (well, except to istall it on your server) My portal app is basically an API that allows you to write extensions. Since my code does nothing but sit there and provide an environment, you don't need to view the code, you just need to understand the API.

So here, developers wouldn't get upset because they can do what they please.
Want another feature? Just go ahead and write a PHP class to extend the portal.
Sure, they wont be able to alter my stuff, but if they want to change their own, they can do as they please.

So essentially, there are no limits here, cause if I don't offer it in the portal, they can roll their own and plug it in.

Which is why I am strongly considering the Encoder here, is because they don't need the viewable source to maintain and extend their services.

Anon

is security... the co i work for has sites that deal with money and every day we have a half dozen folks clog our error logs with attempts to find that hole in the code so they can get some of that money.

as part of our security measures, we use encoder. this guarantees that our source files are untamperable... and that's important.

[deleted]

Hmm... debatable.

An outside hacker cannot modify the source unless they are on the server, in which case they really will not bother to modify a script anymore.

A client will never modify the source unless they have a good reason, and even then they will only do things they know are safe.

A forum, a FAQ, email notification, what else do you need?