[wp-hackers] Premium plugin protection

[Andrew Nacin]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Iain Cambridge <wackiebackie at gmail.com>wrote:

> By decrypting it. Since it's got to be machine readable (modifications
> & distrubitions only) it will have a decrypting method within the code
> somewhere.
>
> The terms and conditions only apply to "COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND
> MODIFICATION" and not to the ability to attach the license to code.
> Simply put if I wanted to encrypt all my code and put it into a
> seperate file and then run it thought mcrypt and eval there is no
> valid reason that I can see I can't GPL that code. It would just be
> silly.
>
> Iain


The Free Software Foundation is very clear in their opinion that encrypted
or obfuscated source code is not source code.

That's not to say you can't ship encrypted, compressed, obfuscated, or
minified source code, only that you need to make the unencrypted,
uncompressed, unobfuscated, or unminified source available. Preferably in
the distribution, but that's not required.

Not doing so is just lame, frankly. :-)