PHP vs. ASP when protecting intellectual property

Is one better than another for when protecting intellectual property

[ryan_b83]

We are a small web development firm developing only in PHP/MySQL. We have a significantly large opportunity with a potential client for their web design/development project. They are concerned with the use of PHP over ASP, and the fact that they believe (although I'm not convinced) that as a result of using ASP over PHP that they would be more secure (legally) when licencing their web applications. As far as I knew, since PHP and ASP are both open source, how could this make any difference? Does anyone know if there is a difference, or any links to resources that might explain this?

Thanks,
Ryan

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't know about legally, but from a simple piracy standpoint, PHP would be significantly more prone to piracy than ASP. Why? ASP is mainly the domain of enterprise level commercial environments were customers are not price sensitive. PHP is mostly the domain of open source weekend warriors where any price is regarded as an insult.

[eelixduppy]

>> PHP would be significantly more prone to piracy than ASP

I think this depends mainly on what the product is and who it targets, IMO. If the target market is professional in nature than it is less likely to be pirated than if it were, for example, a product that many individuals would want. If this product is in high demand, though, either way it will be pirated and you can be sure of that, regardless of what it was coded in.

Since both ASP and PHP are interpreted languages the code given to the purchaser is not obfuscated in any way. There are applications out there that do obfuscate code like this, but IMO these are easily worked around and just not necessary. When comparing two programming languages such as PHP and ASP I think the differences are moot. If we were talking about a compiled language, however, then that would be a different story altogether.

And as far as legality is concerned, I don't see one would be better than the other for licensing...