To use ionCube or rewritten in Python?

As shown by my practice can best be protected from theft in a legal plane: to formalize intellectual property and to issue client license. Well, in the event of a leak to bother on quite legal grounds.
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ionCube, Zend, SourceCop, SourceGuardian, bCompiler in some cases complicate the support for the product as such (there are subtle bugs that are not in a "clean" source).
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However, you can use obfuscators source, if not all, then some critical parts.

zend?
well as sign some source code and will know which client leaked your code and the contract, request from him the payment, well, the script is not very important if you aphradite them all the time, and stolen there will be updates.

Hardly pyton option. He look to ionCube, but have not tried.

Options?
1. To sell the service server with your "super-duper-cool-FOR that requires adult supervision". For not very much money. And thus not to allow them to file.
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2. To make dependent updates.
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3. Part of the code to put on your server (even if secretly). And to call out there. =)
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4. To score, because the stolen codes you may not interfere in your business.

I agree about legal contracts and the net code.
(and in your code, add minor changes (variable names etc.) to determine who's been distributing it)

I want to try HipHop-PHP Compiller. If you will be able to collect and do not know as is now the case with the Redis module (standard C modules need to be rewritten in C++). Although like is used together with Redis.

Can modify the decompiled source code makes sense. On the project, documentation, source code comments and work hard and imagine that you have only the bare code. No reviews nor any internal documentation or experience on this particular project. Add any non-trivial functionality will be very expensive in time and money. However, if you for every trivial edit put customers account for a few k$, then decompilation would make sense, and it seems to me that no one would think to contact.