Finding Nulled WHMCS distributions!

[mfoland 11]

Hello,

I want to let you know to be aware there's Nulled WHMCS's out there, and there's also one on Github.. or more I believe... that is fully decoded. It is my hope that if you find these, you report them to WHMCS! I've been finding sites that even have a nulled license, and I've reported.  I wish we could do a public shaming for those who use Nulled licenses 🙂 Please be aware! 

Speaking of decoded.. it would be nice if WHMCS would share some source to allow further development by developers. I'd even love if like the license addon was somewhat open source (not the part that does the addon check from your whmcs license), but the parts like verify, etc so that one could build on to the verification portal or make a total custom verification portal 🙂

[bear 39]

10 minutes ago, mfoland said:

Speaking of decoded.. it would be nice if WHMCS would share some source

I hear there's one on Github...oh. 😜

As long as there's encoded software someone will come up with decoding for it. It's important to remember that they're often imperfect versions, or worse, contain back doors and exploits. Really not worth it. 

[mfoland 11]

I agree. I wouldn't use a pirated copy. I actually pay for my license lol. I just think it sucks that people decode it and circumvent the licensing.

[brian! 1,820]

12 hours ago, mfoland said:

I want to let you know to be aware there's Nulled WHMCS's out there, and there's also one on Github.. or more I believe... that is fully decoded.

shock news - there are plenty of nulled (not decrypted) releases out there if you choose to go looking for them! 🤯

I don't really see the point of the thread - someone with a legit license is not going to switch to using a nulled version; anyone with a nulled version is not going to care about this thread either... and if they're daft enough to be using one and risking their online business and customers, then they'll pay in the end.

WHMCS have dealt with various GitHub's over the years, but there are still one or two left... and there always will be.

12 hours ago, mfoland said:

It is my hope that if you find these, you report them to WHMCS! I've been finding sites that even have a nulled license, and I've reported.

absolutely - about the only time I open a ticket with WHMCS now is to report the nulled URLs to their legal department and let them deal with the culprits.

anyway, there's a whiff of "Fight Club" about this topic, so i'll leave it there.

[mfoland 11]

I report any one that is found that not licensed :) why can’t people play fair and pay for their licenses?? If admin wants to they can delete this post :) I love WHMCS! It is one amazing billing platform 

[brian! 1,820]

Just now, mfoland said:

I love WHMCS! It is one amazing billing platform 

nurse! 👩‍⚕️

[bear 39]

5 hours ago, brian! said:

anyway, there's a whiff of "Fight Club" about this topic, so i'll leave it there.

Dangit, broke the first rule! :P

[mfoland 11]

lol! An admin can delete this post 🙂

[jster1324 0]

It would be nice if WHMCS offered a special license and require an NDA for source code. I fully own WHMCS licensing but I do use the decoded github repos to figure out how things really work under the hood. I cant begin to describe how useful its been with plugin development. We would be willing to pay good money for something like this.

[mfoland 11]

On 2/5/2019 at 4:01 PM, jster1324 said:

It would be nice if WHMCS offered a special license and require an NDA for source code. I fully own WHMCS licensing but I do use the decoded github repos to figure out how things really work under the hood. I cant begin to describe how useful its been with plugin development. We would be willing to pay good money for something like this.

I’m surprised they haven’t banned your license if you use the decoded lol. WHMCS does one heck of a job with coding for sure and like you I wish it could be more open source. Blesta is but they only code the license files. It allows for development. I’d like to build upon the license verifier but with smarty you can’t do crap. It needs to be open source!!

[mfoland 11]

@WHMCS ChrisD can you chime in here?

 

i have an idea for WHMCS. What if they charged for an open source version but encode the licensing parts so that developers could help better the program and make more detailed modules! Having a full perspective would be amazing

[jster1324 0]

3 minutes ago, mfoland said:

I’m surprised they haven’t banned your license if you use the decoded lol. WHMCS does one heck of a job with coding for sure and like you I wish it could be more open source. Blesta is but they only code the license files. It allows for development. I’d like to build upon the license verifier but with smarty you can’t do crap. It needs to be open source!!

To be clear I dont use a decoded WHMCS version. I dont even have a copy of the decoded version in my possession whatsoever. I only visit the github repo as reference when developing plugins. For example, I didnt like how the SendEmail API hook worked. So I go in and check out the WHMCS\Message and \Mailer classes and use them to create my own mail function within my plugin that still has all the email logging and uses the system email configuration. 

Seriously my company would be ready to pay a good chunk of change and sign an NDA if thats what it takes. Or they could just take the Blesta approach and only encode the license files. Its pretty well known that you can get every release of WHMCS for free already so they dont have anything to lose. Mind as well make some extra money off it. Also Im pretty sure this would make the application much faster. Comparing file size of the encoded to unencoded shows that theres like a 4x increase in file size after encoding. 

[mfoland 11]

2 hours ago, jster1324 said:

To be clear I dont use a decoded WHMCS version. I dont even have a copy of the decoded version in my possession whatsoever. I only visit the github repo as reference when developing plugins. For example, I didnt like how the SendEmail API hook worked. So I go in and check out the WHMCS\Message and \Mailer classes and use them to create my own mail function within my plugin that still has all the email logging and uses the system email configuration. 

Seriously my company would be ready to pay a good chunk of change and sign an NDA if thats what it takes. Or they could just take the Blesta approach and only encode the license files. Its pretty well known that you can get every release of WHMCS for free already so they dont have anything to lose. Mind as well make some extra money off it. Also Im pretty sure this would make the application much faster. Comparing file size of the encoded to unencoded shows that theres like a 4x increase in file size after encoding. 

How can you get a copy for free? Do you mean via Softaculous? Normally you need an active license to download WHMCS, unless one were to choose to be illegal and go the nulled route. The github decode isn't nulled I don't think. It should still have any of the licensing stuff in tact. 

 

I'd sign an NDA myself. There's some features I really want to build on to.  @jster1324 you can DM me, and we could discuss about building things! I do have the licensing addon 🙂 

 

WHMCS.. Please at least start either making more features available with the API, and working better with Smarty, to where even the license verifyer could be customized more.. or start opening some source up! 🙂 More people use Blesta for the pure fact that it's almost 100% open source. I think they say it's 99.4% open source or something like that, because it only has 3 encoded files!

[brian! 1,820]

On 03/02/2019 at 16:03, mfoland said:

I report any one that is found that not licensed 🙂

you won't be today - their license verification page is up & down like a yo-yo!  🙄

On 05/02/2019 at 21:01, jster1324 said:

I fully own WHMCS licensing but I do use the decoded github repos to figure out how things really work under the hood. I cant begin to describe how useful its been with plugin development. We would be willing to pay good money for something like this.

personally, I see nothing wrong with that... there are posts in these forums containing internal WHMCS functions that aren't mentioned anywhere in the documentation that i'm aware of. 😉

17 hours ago, mfoland said:

i have an idea for WHMCS. What if they charged for an open source version but encode the licensing parts so that developers could help better the program and make more detailed modules! Having a full perspective would be amazing

possibly because then others could more easily offer support services to the core product... I won't go into details (not even privately!), but I know for a fact that some users would have actively looked into do that if access to the core code was legally available... whether there is still an appetite for that, I don't know as the option isn't going to be available any time soon.

15 hours ago, mfoland said:

How can you get a copy for free? Do you mean via Softaculous? Normally you need an active license to download WHMCS, unless one were to choose to be illegal and go the nulled route. The github decode isn't nulled I don't think. It should still have any of the licensing stuff in tact. 

remember the Fight Club rules boys!

besides, decoded and nulled are usually two different things... it's often an either or.

[jster1324 0]

On 2/7/2019 at 10:05 AM, brian! said:

possibly because then others could more easily offer support services to the core product... I won't go into details (not even privately!), but I know for a fact that some users would have actively looked into do that if access to the core code was legally available... whether there is still an appetite for that, I don't know as the option isn't going to be available any time soon.

Is WHMCS making any real money from support? What little they do make can easily be made up plus more by offering to sell access to the source code behind locked doors. Why does this business model work so well for blesta? Opening the source for such a well known product would just expand the ecosystem like crazy.

WHMCS has the basis of a fantastic IT billing tool but their development cycles are just too slow to make it anything big before something else comes to dethrone them. They need to give it up to the people to make the needed changes that they dont focus on for whatever reason.

[brian! 1,820]

10 hours ago, jster1324 said:

Is WHMCS making any real money from support?

there are only 2 reasons to regularly pay WHMCS money - support and updates... if others took over providing alternatives to either, many users have seen enough to look elsewhere.

10 hours ago, jster1324 said:

WHMCS has the basis of a fantastic IT billing tool but their development cycles are just too slow to make it anything big before something else comes to dethrone them.

we've been warning them of that for years.. but they're not going to change.

[bear 39]

10 hours ago, jster1324 said:

Why does this business model work so well for blesta?

For them it's used as a selling point, and a direct comparison to WHMCS goes on all the time, with that being mentioned loads. They even created that silly "billing brawl" site to compare it. 

At least so far, I'm not seeing a huge advance in market share (anecdotal, no evidence but observation) over WHMCS. I don't care for the mass of obfuscated code on WHMCS, but don't think (mostly) viewable code is causing more uptake of the other one, but I do think the price and license changes WHMCS recently undertook absolutely opened a door for them.