Christopher Kunz has gone back and revisited the PHPShield product that he'd looked at previously with data obscured to make potential customer think that it had nothing to do with either SourceGuardian or Inovica.

Checking up on it again, he was happily surprised with some of the results:

I asked him again today via private mail and his response was swift. The whois entries for phpshield.com now point to his person and we can expect additional information on the web site itself soon. I like it when things can be resolved like that and I actually think this is a chance for his product rather than a possible competition issue.

This helps to more clearly define the difference between the PHPShield and SourceGuarian products. You can find out more information about each product from their sites - PHPShield and SourceGuarian. Both are encoding packages to help protect and distribute your code.

Christopher Kunz has shared about a resource he came across that offers complete PHP encoding for a much lower price than some of the other services - phpshield.com. It seems a little too good to be true, though:

However, the phpShield.com home page did not offer the slightest clue who actually is behind that product. [...] It's common practice to whitelabel your solutions and sell them under different brands with different feature sets to different target audiences. However, we always clearly state who is behind the whitelabelled solution.

A little more digging shows an interesting relationship between the company that sells SourceGuardian and the company behind this PHPShield (Inovica). He sees the deception counting against the company and has just "struck one off the list" from his search for encoding methods.

In his laste blog post, Steve Hannah shares some of his "adventures with PHP compilers" that he's had in the process of finding something to help him protect his work.

I am in a situation where I need to protect some intellectual property in a PHP script. The recommended solution is to use a code obfuscator (or compiler) to encode the script. Currently the landscape leaves much to be desired in this area as far as PHP is concerned.

He talks about Zend Guard, Source Guardian and bcompiler. It's this last one he focuses on the most, noting that it's a dynamic PECL extension to be included into PHP and used, but it doesn't quite seem to work so easily. He finally manages to get something compiled, only to find it doesn't work when executed anymore.

Conclusion: bcompiler is not ready for primetime yet. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong on this point.

He had higher hopes for SourceGuardian, though, and thankfully, it seemed to pull through. His second post on the topic notes that it "worked flawlessly" when he encoded the file and just as easily when decoding and running the script as well. He highly recommends it to anyone looking to protect their PHP source code.

In his laste blog post, Steve Hannah shares some of his "adventures with PHP compilers" that he's had in the process of finding something to help him protect his work.

I am in a situation where I need to protect some intellectual property in a PHP script. The recommended solution is to use a code obfuscator (or compiler) to encode the script. Currently the landscape leaves much to be desired in this area as far as PHP is concerned.

He talks about Zend Guard, Source Guardian and bcompiler. It's this last one he focuses on the most, noting that it's a dynamic PECL extension to be included into PHP and used, but it doesn't quite seem to work so easily. He finally manages to get something compiled, only to find it doesn't work when executed anymore.

Conclusion: bcompiler is not ready for primetime yet. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong on this point.

He had higher hopes for SourceGuardian, though, and thankfully, it seemed to pull through. His second post on the topic notes that it "worked flawlessly" when he encoded the file and just as easily when decoding and running the script as well. He highly recommends it to anyone looking to protect their PHP source code.