Hi, I have been creating a cross browser compatible ( >= ie 6 + standards complaint browsers ) Online Instant Messenger
What I would like to know is what licensing would I need to protect my code? how would i go about getting a license and where from?
My code is in PHP, and jQuery.
Regards,
Phil
As per the berne convention, You have the copyright to any Intellectual property you produce (including source code).
By "protect my code", I assume you want to distribute your code (source or binaries) and impose usage restrictions. For that you have to release your code under a License that you will choose. There are a number of Licenses (CC/GPL/LGPL/Mozilla/Eclipse etc) and you can write your own as well
If you have some new proprietary algos/tools/techniques and you dont want to make them public but ensure no one will use them without your permission, then Patent is the way to go (There is a lot of drama associated with patents, but that's out of the scope right now)
Or do you want to enforce the license under which you distribute your product (rather than just relying on paper), and so use a license manager to do so?
Dominic
If you are distributing the source, you can pick a license to distribute under or right your own license in at the top. If you are not distributing your source, you need to make sure that your webserver is set up with proper access on the PHP pages so that anonymous users cannot read your php code.
There are also obfuscation and compiling tools available for PHP. You may be interested in them. As for your javascript code, you can use tools to minify it that will obfuscate it somewhat, but in general, you're releasing it into the wild.