Recently Hybodus, a network monitoring tool, decided to halt development because their lead developer had left them.
Hybodus is using ioncube to encode its PHP sourcecode, preventing paying customers from distributing and modifying the code.
This is of course a good idea, but requires the company to activly develop and bugfix the project, as this doesn’t seem possible anymore, I encurrage the Hybodus developers to release the project as open source, at least release the code to paying customers.
If I had a chance to look at the code, I could fix all the bugs and implement the features I wanted, right now I’m stuck with a product I cannot control and won’t receive updates on.