WordPress theme and plugin development using private repository

Question

I have no experience yet with any repositories so I'm a newbie at this.

My developer and I are creating a WordPress theme along with some plugins. Please let me know if the process I am thinking is correct or doable.

Basically, we do not want anyone to copy our WordPress theme or plugins. So to protect ourselves, I was thinking somehow linking the theme and plugins which are installed on a site which we create, to the private repo and pulling in the theme and plugin files that way.

Does this make sense?

Answer 1

"Basically, we do not want anyone to copy our WordPress theme or plugins"

In that case, I would very strongly recommend not using WordPress at all. It is GPL (http://wordpress.org/about/gpl/). Any plugin or theme on WordPress is going to be GPL too. And folks who try to keep their code closed source in this community are generally not going to be very well received (eg http://www.ivycat.com/2013/07/a-newbies-guide-to-the-gpl-and-wordpress-licensing/ and http://www.designcrumbs.com/automatically-blackballed).

If you want to close your source code, that's your business. But even so much as trying to do that in WordPress... I mean you can, but it's not gonna go over very well in the community. If closed source matters to you, WordPress is really not the right platform to be on.

Answer 2

I was not expecting myself to recommend to anyone one of php encoding solution, but if you ask: see http://www.ioncube.com/ or google for similar. You have to realize, that is quite easy to break and needs some effort from users to be installed. And personally I think evanv (answer below) is right.