NYCPHP Meetup

[George Herson]

Oktay Altunergil wrote:
 > my 2 cents on this..
 >
 > At work I cannot code some apps in PHP because the code will be copied by
 > customers/competitors and used on other servers.  I personally could not care
 > less and would love to have all of my code open sourced. However this is a
 > business, and any kind of distinct features you have make the difference
 > between you and your competitors. Granted, they can reverse engineer or just
 > get your idea and design an even better system than you could ever do myself.
 > But that is not the point. In the business world, open source fans are not
 > the people who make decisions. It's the management who decides what you can
 > and cannot do. For this reason I am actually interested in the product
 > mentioned.
 >
 > Now I'm not an expert at this but the product seems to do key based
 > encyrption. This is a few steps ahead of mangling the code to make it
 > unreadable by humans. On the other hand, for PHP to parse to code it has to
 > be decrypted and if PHP can decrypt it so can you.

Key-based encryption means a key is required for decryption, so neither PHP nor 
a human will be able to decrypt w/o it.  (Short of a brute force attack, 
assuming any of the common, good algorithms (DES, RSA) are used).

My take on the code encryption controversy, such as it is, is that since a 
significanct percentage of consulting customers are dead-beatish (late or no 
pay), anything you can do to create an incentive for eventual payment, such as 
making modification to delivered code v. difficult, is a good thing.  And that's 
just one application for code-encryption technology, so to say it is never 
useful is silly, IMO.

cheers,
george

 > I would like more
 > information about this in the FAQ if the developers are tuned in.
 >
 > Oktay Altunergil
 >