Kauft das PHP-Sicherheitsbuch!Links Tag cloud@christopherkunz
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Wednesday, April 23. 2008PHPShield, SourceGuardian and Inovica Ltd.
By way of a discussion in #php.de @ IRCNet, I stumbled about “phpshield.com” which offers a PHP encoding solution for a deadbeat price of 55 bucks. Other choices, like SourceGuardian, ioncube or Zend are much more pricy. However, the phpShield.com home page did not offer the slightest clue who actually is behind that product. How someone would entrust their PHP scripts (which obviously include their intellectual property) to a product that’s not only closed-source but also sold by an anonymous third party is beyond me. It’s common practise to whitelabel your solutions and sell them under different brands with different feature sets to different target audiences. We do this with gameservers and hosting, too. However, we always clearly state who is behind the whitelabelled solution (and we are also obliged to do this by law, which I think is good). The phpshield people do not have any clue on their pages. The domain is registered to this dude: Administrative Contact: I really have to ask: Why are they trying to hide? To me, that is not acceptable business practice. Incidentially, I’m currently evaluationg PHP encoding solutions for a customer request and I just struck one off the list. UPDATE: Adrian has responded in a very helpful comment, clearing a lot of the issues up. Please check the comments to this entry. Comments
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Christopher, I’m Adrian from Inovica. I thought I’d respond to your posting - hope that’s OK. phpSHIELD was originally developed by a guy separate to Inovica and we brought him, and his product, into the company. We decided to keep phpSHIELD separate from SourceGuardian because whilst it has many features that are the same, some of the key elements required for developers who are distributing code (such as IP limiting, time limiting etc) are not within phpSHIELD. This is the reason for the price differential. It’s not a like-for-like white label product. I do take on your comments regarding the anonymous nature of the site and I’ll take this on personally to address. I hope this answers your questions, but feel free to contact me directly if you require further follow up. Appreciate that we’ve lost you as a potential customer, but I’m a big believer in putting my hands up if we’ve messed up, so hope this clarifies the position via the way of a public response.
Best regards. Adrian
Thanks for the comment and thanks for clearing this up so quickly. I’ll update the blog posting and add a note to your comment. It’s very much appreciated (I think also by the other dudes in the PHP community).
Hi
Nice post I am in the same situation right now:" looking for trusted, yet affordable php protector software. Th equality is matter and therefore price. I looked at zend.com website and even they so called co owners of php engines they description on how zend guard works iz so limited to compare to SourceGuardian, so honestly i even trusted more to SourceGuardian then zend guard. SourceGuardian explained in details how it works and what u can expect, while zend has sucked to answer my email for almost 1 month  Regarding pricing: it looks like zend charge $600 for one, year and next year you hav eto pay again $600 or u are out of software... while i tlooks like SourceGuardian chARGES one time fees. Anyway i still looking for the solution to source protection, if you can publish your research results it would be great...
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A couple weeks ago, I blogged about PHPshield’s anonymous website, raising more than an eyebrow to the ominous business practices of hiding the true owner’s identity while selling a whitelabelled product. To my great relief, Adrian respond
Tracked: May 21, 19:27