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Encoding your scripts, when?

Posted: Wed May 07, 2003 4:05 pm
by dstefani
Hello all,

I'm kind of new to the business of freelance programming and I was wondering...

If a client who owns a website hires you to write say, a seach engine and an HTML page generator from their DB. Do they own that code, since they hired you to build custom code? If you knew from talking to them once you started that they intended to hack your code and resuse it on their site, would you encode it to stop them from doing so?

Or if you put in your contract that all code remains your property would that justify your encoding it?

If you have any suggested sites that discuss this kind of thing I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,

- D

Posted: Wed May 07, 2003 10:52 pm
by phice
If you choose to not encrypt your coding, make the client(s) pay more for the vital code. If they choose not to pay as much, simply encrypt, and they'll only be able to use it, not edit it.

Simple as that.

Posted: Thu May 08, 2003 2:53 am
by r337ard
seems like a personal choice. if i were coding a site for people who were going to just change it and use it on other sites at their whim i would want more money then if i were simply doing the code for a SOHO type buisness who just want a webpage.
i dont think i would actually encode a page tho.

now if you use code others have released as part of it, i dont really think you could encode it. at least not if it were released under a licence that prevented it. but thats obvious.

Posted: Thu May 08, 2003 3:50 am
by twigletmac
Put copyright notices in the code (you wrote it so you own it unless you have a contract with them that specifies otherwise), make sure that they understand your stance on the reuse of your code and then they can't argue that they didn't know. I would also probably charge them more - if they want the copyright and the right to do whatever they like with the code then they should pay for that. Or you could hand over code with strangely named variables and no newlines...

Mac

Posted: Thu May 08, 2003 7:58 am
by dstefani
Groovy baby,
This has nudged my brain in the right direction.
What got me thinking about this was the Zend encoder.
I'm not sure how it works, I started to check out the ZDE, but while the editor seemed very powerful in some ways, the few things I didin't like stopped me from considering it. So I left of my Zend experience. I think I'll revisit that scene with just the encoder in mind. I'll get back to this post if I find anything really interesting.

Thanks for your input.

- D

Posted: Thu May 08, 2003 8:18 am
by Wandrer