How to make a licensed plugin?

[Deyth]

What's the most effective model for making a plugin that isn't free? I know there's no real way to prevent determined pirates but I also know that certain plugins have gone on to some success. vBulletin itself is an extreme example of that. I was hoping some of the devs here could offer advice. Thanks in advance.

[SEOvB]

You can't stop piracy, people pirate, and those who download pirated software 90% of the time won't buy it any way. But you can use things like IonCube or Zend to encrypt your software, you could require a license key be entered, that calls back to your site, if the key isn't valid, features won't work, etc etc.

[Deyth]

Thanks. On a different note, do people get much in the way of donations when they go that route? What's your experience been?

[Farcaster]

If you had the server and bandwidth for it, you could make part of your application dependant on a web service that you host. That might work for some types of applications anyway. That way the pirate would have to at least decipher and replace the remote part of the functionality.

[Deyth]

Originally Posted by Farcaster

If you had the server and bandwidth for it, you could make part of your application dependant on a web service that you host. That might work for some types of applications anyway. That way the pirate would have to at least decipher and replace the remote part of the functionality.

That's a good idea but not really applicable in this case.