[wp-hackers] Premium plugin protection

[Ryan Bilesky]

I agree I have ran into themes that do that with the footer, in an effort to
force you to keep their links, so when they do that I will rebuild the
footer html myself then remove their links just to spite them lol, but hey
its GPL I can do that.  Whereas if they would have left the footer as just
plain code, I would have either just kept the links or make a donation to
the developer before removing if I really didn't want the links but liked
the template.

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:

> Just a data point to consider.
>
> Obfuscating your source code makes other developers hate you, badmouth
> you, and send as much negative press your way as possible. Why?
> Because you have made them look bad.
>
> Friend of mine called me up a few months ago. Said her boss was having
> problems with a WordPress installation (big local blog). I wandered
> down to their offices, met with them, found out what the problem was,
> sat down at her desk... and got totally screwed over because the (paid
> for) theme used frickin' encryption on the functions.php file. All
> they wanted was some relatively minor changes, but because of the
> encryption (good hard stuff too, not easy to decode), there was
> basically nothing I could do. I had to make my apologies as best I
> could. Then I immediately got on Twitter and badmouthed the hell out
> of the theme creators.
>
> Consider your users and what's best for them. What's *really* best for
> them is not having to come to you for every single little problem. If
> they can learn something and solve issues themselves, then you should
> let them do so. What are you selling here, after all? Lock in?
>
> People who obfuscate or otherwise make their code hard for their users
> to use are scum. Period.
>
> -Otto
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