Branding

Hi All,

I have designed and developed an admin panel and my client wants to use sell it under his brand. What are the issues involved?

Regards,
Ranjan

Biggest issue... Do you mean that you client wants to USE it or SELL it? You mention both, so I'm not sure which one is right.

If your client wants to use it for their own internal purposes with their branding, that should be easy. Just re-skin it, and give it back to them.

If they want to on-sell it to others with their branding, charge them either a flat fee for the software, take a percentage of each sale that they make as commission, or work on a mixture of the two.

As long as the software is something that you have developed 100%, then what you do with it, and how you sell it, is completely up to you. The only word of caution is to check the licensing of any code that you have uses in your software that has come from any other source. Most open soure licenses are pretty good with this, but there's also a lot that require anything from a notice in the source code of the copyright owner, to you paying royalties for the sales, to just flat out not allowing you to resell their code.

What language is the code in? One of the troubles with re-selling 4GL apps is that they're interpreted during run-time, and aren't compiled, meaning there's nothing stopping your client from simply stealing your code and pawning it off as their own.

There are compilers and obfuscators for 4GL langauges (eg, PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc). In that manner, you would sell licenses for your software to your client, who would in turn mark up the price and sell them to their customers.

Just a thought...

Considering that the OP hasn't been back after what.. 2 weeks of asking this question, I get the feeling that they aren't quite as serious about this as they should be.

Most people would do the right thing and consult a laywer for a question that is this inherantly legal. Others just come on the net...

Just include in a agreement that he knows he reselling your services and not buying your business.

And just as food for thought, ASP.NET applications can be compiled into DLLs with no visible code. Always nice...

PHP also has compiler options, and runs on more than just Windows.

Learned something new today... I used to be a PHP guy, but many years ago, before OOP came around. That's why I switched.

I was just giving you sh*t Thanks for being a good sport.

Yeah, PHP5 is all OOP; you can implement any of the Gang of Four Design Patterns, plus PHP can do things that stricter languages (eg, Java) just can't reproduce. And, of course, PHP runs on all of the major OSes, databases, etc...

First sorry for turning back so late. and then thanks all for your responses.

Thanks drgroove for your valuable comments...can you please name some of the compilers and obfuscators that can be used...also which one is best and why it is best and is there any free out of these? I code in PHP.

Thanks for your help.

Best Regards,
Ranjan

Honestly, I've never used any PHP compilers. I've read about them, but never had need to use one thusfar. Looks like there's one at phpcompiler.org; I also recall Zend, the company that publishes the PHP engine, offering one for sale.

I tried Zend's some years ago, but it's not free. I don't know of any freebies that can compile php to non-viewable code. I think there are some "obfuscators" but afaik they won't protect against other than casual viewers of the code.

Looks like this one is free. http://phpcompiler.org/

Thanks drgroove. I will try soon and will be back with any of the developments.

Thanks,
Ranjan

Thanks for the link!