commercial Web application PHP - [duplicate]

Question

I was thinking of making a commercial application to sell to customers to install on their servers but I wanted to do it with PHP & MySQL.

what should i do to ensure that the source code (& Database) will not be opened nor copied. The most important thing is the code will be hosted on the customer server. And also how to ensure that the customer will not resell the web application (like copying the code & Db to other people)

Thank you

Answer 1

As long as the software is distributed in source code form (versus binary), there are no way to prevent the customer opening / altering it. Even binaries can be more or less reverse-engineered by decompiling them.

One can obfuscate the code in order to make it difficult to read / understand how it works, but as every countermeasure, it won't stop piracy – sooner or later someone with enough motivation will bypass it.

You have few options:

1. Sell your software as a service (SAAS).

2. Just don't care about piracy, high-profile / most users will probably pay anyway if the price is reasonable.

3. Licence it as free (libre) and profit by selling support etc.

Answer 2

You can use Zend Guard and some controls inside your applications to try to mitigate piracy on your PHP WEB applications.

DataBase will probably remain open.

Answer 3

There's a lot of question around PHP code obfuscation / encryption / compilation on SO. Check them out.

There is a number of products to protect PHP code like Zend Guard, ioncube encoder and others.

Related SO questions:

• Minify / obfuscate PHP code

• Best solution to protect PHP code without encryption

• PHP Source Encryption - Effectiveness and Disadvantages

• How can you make a PHP application require a key to work?

• Can I encrypt PHP source or compile it so others can’t see it? and how?

• How to prevent resale of PHP source?