Q:

Is Symfony2 ready for production?

I am in the process of planning a custom web application which will be sold (not SaaS) and so will be required to be installed on different servers. Do you think it would be a bad/good idea to go with Symfony2 or Zend Framework.
I have to choose 1 and can't go with any other framework as I only have extensive knowledge with both of these. Despite my experience with Symfony2, I would still appreciate another opinion.
My main concerns are ease of install on servers and source code protection. Sadly, it would seem ZF already has this going for it in that you don't need 5.3 like Symfony2, and we have Zend Guard.
Any advice is welcome! I am looking to nurture and grow this app and I really want to be sure the first step is the right one.

A:

The Symfony2 download page still says: 

Be warned that Symfony 2.0 is not
  stable yet; use it with caution
  (current version is Beta 1).

So I would wait just a but for Symfony2.
I'm not sure what you mean by source code protection but there is no point in encoding any part of any of the two frameworks since they are both open source (and you should see if their licenses actually do permit that!).
Zend Framework 2 is still in the oven and for the looks of it, Symfony2 will be out of beta way before ZF2. If you can't wait, then use the one that you are most comfortable with. Otherwise, wait for Symfony2 to come out of beta and then wait a little bit more until they iron out it's bugs.
Now, about bundling the framework in your application, you are probably going to need to write an installer of sorts. You could first look at the "sandbox" version of Symfony to see how they did that. It's basically an unzip-it-and-it-works kind of install. No need to set anything up. That could give you some pointers.
Whatever you do, you'll need to write a minimum specs script that users can download and run to check whether their system has everything ready to run your app (check configs, php modules, etc, etc). See SlideShowPro Director for an example of such scripts.
Subjective answer: I'd go with ZF because that's what I know better, but having said that, performance wise I've had better results with Symfony. Apparently ZF2 will have see huge speed improvements.

