Originally Posted by Babaganoosh

I'm not talking out of my ass here. You know I used to write and sell software, right? It was written in Perl so there was no easy way to encode it. I had a few hundred licensed domains running my scripts. My scripts did phone home and I did occasionally catch someone running a copy they weren't licensed for. Usually a quick email resulted in them buying the script or removing it from the server. I had to contact the host to deal with it a couple of times. Piracy on those scripts wasn't that big of an issue.

Really though, these encoded scripts can't be run on a current version of PHP. I paid for the scripts. The encoding is preventing a legit customer from using what they paid for and that's fucked up. If they weren't encoded I would still be able to use what I bought.

I am never buying another encoded script...ever. Whoever encodes their software can forget me buying their scripts. That's a guaranteed lost sale. You act like every illegal copy of a script is a lost sale. Most of the people who steal software likely would never purchase anyway.

Zend encoding is not a reliable way to protect code anyway since it can be broken so easily. For instance, core.php from uugallery took me about 2 seconds to crack. How is that protecting anything?