Notification on installation

[Troost]

Hiya!

For example, lets say, I've designed a template and connected this to ProcessWire. I sell it to my client, 1 license for €XXX,-. How can I be sure the template isn't going to be installed 20 times for 20 of his other clients? Is this a case of trusting his on his blue eyes. Or is there like something I can put in the install.php that notificates me each time the installation is complete?

I am wondering how you guys manage those things?

Thanks in advance, cheers!

[teppo]

This isn't something that I personally do, but basically it boils down to a couple of strategies:

1. Use some sort of mechanism for validating number of installations. It can be a license key or something else, but basically you'd have to add code that connects to your server to validate the installation.

2. Explain to the client what they are allowed to do and trust that they follow these instructions. Provide a contract or license and make sure that you can prove they've agreed on it, in case you want to take an action based on it later.

Personally I would choose method 2. First of all it's a lot less hassle for you (method 1 is basically only worth it if you intend to sell your product to a relatively big number of clients), and second of all whatever protection you add will be easy to override or remove.

... not to mention that if your code sends data to you, you could potentially get into some trouble for that if it isn't communicated *very* clearly ?

[LostKobrakai]

Yeah. Communication is certainly the most important part. Depending on how you service your clients I this might even be entirely out of line. The second step would be having a proper licensing and contracts between yourself and the customers. This is the only thing, which will help you if there's someone not playing by the rules. Only after that you can look into making it harder to not play by the rules e.g. using license keys or tools with can encode php code like ioncube. Stuff like that can easily backfire though. For me code using ioncube would be a big reason to look for alternatives. Code which talks to your servers (e.g. license code validation) or even more invasive things like analytic tracking can cause problems in tightly locked down server environments, where code is not allowed to connect to arbitrary external services. So it might also depend on your potential customers what of the methods makes sense.

[wbmnfktr]

If you believe your client will sell the theme you did for them should already be a red flag.

But there are a few things in mind.

1. ProcessWire isn't that often used as WordPress, so selling the custom theme might no really pay off.
2. If the work is highly customized it will be hard to sell it anyway.
3. If your client paid you for creating a custom PW theme and not for a custom business website you are too late to the party in this case.
4. Depending on your location (country and legislation) selling a custom theme/website might already break copyright laws - in this case you might only need a good lawyer.
5. Being in an association or union might help as well - but depending on your country and legislation, offered services, contracts and some more details it could be too late as well in this case.

For now or the future... if you have a bad feeling about clients in regards of "they will steal my work" make it more difficult to clone/copy your work.

• don't provide full sources of PHP/CSS/JS/SVG/PSD/AI/...
• add licenses/copyright notices with your details within a license.md/.txt
• add license/copyright details in your main files
• add and use custom namespaces for functions, classes, whatever
• never work without a contract
• never work without those details written down in the contract
• write your own framework/functions and built-up on that, while providing basics of it as Open Source on Github

Those things can proof your ownership of that code if necessary or at least will benefit you in proofing in to some point.

[Troost]

@teppo @LostKobrakai

Thanks for your responses!

Concluding both your responses I assume that working by trust and the terms and conditions is the best (and in my opinion the most likely) way to 'prevent' this of happening. I'm not planning on going that big where I need to work with server validating licenses. Considering my potential customers, this should not be a problem. 

[Troost]

@wbmnfktr Thanks for your clear response!

I will keep those things in mind working down my roadmap. I'm about to reorganize and restructure my workflow, so these tips can help me out, thanks a lot!