I see how zend encoding helps you retain all rights to your work; but if someone has $20/page they can submit it to sites which specialize in decoding zend files; so for the people who really want to steal your content, they will...

All zending most files does is deter people who enjoy customizations, from the newbies to the experianced, they just want to see how things work and tweak them to their needs...

As posted before, the current version is mainly fully encoded because it is an early sneak preview. It is also the only way to enforce an expiration date.

I am aware of the Chinese decoding site but it is not that smooth as they claim. Newer versions of Zend/ionCube have obfuscations features, which makes the decoding much harder. In most cases you get broken files were significant parts are missing. The other question is will someone pay $1000+ just to get a broken source code of an early beta version?

not me

Lol likely not; but it's still a possibility (and I hope you don't have THAT many files for a script, $1k at $5 a file, that's about 200 files; that is a crapload of encoded files lol). Also, I've seen more than just one "chinese" site about getting files "unencoded".

So long as the final isn't encoded, it's all good