I have spent the last two years of evenings and weekends developing a small, but flexible, even powerful in places, little CMS (all Perl, HTML::Template, and MySQL). When we develop a site for a customer, we give them the option of purchasing a "license" to use the CMS in conjunction with their site (sliding scale based on number of users and pages).

Point here is: I've got hundreds of hours into this that I would like to protect. The fact that it sits on a customers host makes it available for the taking.

I've had two trains of thought: 1) this is commercial software so protect it, 2) consider this "open source" and not worry about it—we've all spent hundreds of hours writing programs. Anyway, let me unpack each.

Commercial tack:

I could think of this like other commercial software. But that is usually purchased and resides on my own hard drive. Those are usually easier to protect, e.g., using the machine's ID.

The web installation is a little trickier. For instance, our CMS uses a third-party wysiwyg editor that we purchase for each installation of our CMS. Of course, once we have it, we could just use it unlimitedly, but we're honest folk and just keep buying copies.

For our own CMS I've thought we could:

  1. require that we host their sites so we only one copy is necessary—a copy we have tucked away and can easy control and update
  2. let them host their own, but link to our server where the CMS resides and is run from. But this strikes me as messy, if it can even be done feasibly.
  3. have a chunk of core coding that remains on our server, and is called like any library module. Of course, any enterprising coder can simply write in the missing code.
  4. are there other ways?

Open Source tack:

To be honest, I'm not completely sure what qualifies as open source. With the number of excellent open source CMS's out there, why is another one necessary? Especially ours—one that is written specifically for graphic designers who want to limit the customer's use of colors/fonts/grids in order to keep the brand identity under control, and does require more extensive setup.

Bottomline: I want to protect and profit from my investment, but I want to be fair to the programming "community." I'm sure there are monks that work for companies, or have their own, that need the financial security of selling their software. However, though I had to buy my most excellent code editor, I still profit indirectly from the availability of Linux, MySQL, CPAN modules, and, of course, Perl itself.

What do others think/do? Any other software moguls out there? Or is everyone part of some programming commune? Thanks all!


—Brad
"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men." George Eliot

In reply to Protecting our work by bradcathey

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