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Arrests For Selling Poison-Ware In Spain
An anonymous reader writes "Spain's FBI equivalent has arrested the management of a software company (Google translation; Spanish original) for selling custom software to small and medium-sized businesses with 'controlled errors' that resulted in the software bombing on a predetermined date. They would then charge for fixing the problem and press the client into buying a maintenance contract. More than 1,000 clients were affected."
I hope they throw the book at them. They're basically holding their customers hostage.
Even worse, they are breaking some contract for sure. Bugs are one thing; every written piece of software contains bugs. But when you intentionally code the program to fail at certain intervals you are cheating the customers.
What if cars were programmed to randomly stop at some random interval? GM's head would be served up on a plate.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
There's nothing the least bit controlled about Microsoft's errors, so I fail to see how this could apply to them.
Planned obsolescence (planning for a product to go out of service) has no relation to selling someone a product that explicitly developed from the start to not do it's advertised capabilities.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
In the US, the corporation, not the people, would be charged with a crime. And then they'd settle with the Government for a fine and no admission of wrongdoing.
It sounds like Spain out-justiced the US this time around.
Per Wiki regarding software
Noticed that there's no mention of disabling a program or set of features on a set date. You can still run MS DOS if you wish for as long as you want. Just don't expect to get any support from Microsoft. You're on your own. That's the difference between planned obsolescence and poison-ware.
Life is not for the lazy.
The folks at the obfuscated C contest would like to point out that just because you see the source doesn't mean you'll easily be able to figure out what it's doing.
True.
But it's a lot easier than with a closed source program with the code owned by the crooks.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sure. And who, exactly, is going to contribute to an open source project written intentionally obfuscated? Nobody. Then the project gets the reputation of being shoddy, and nobody uses it.
Or, there's also the "we'll just rewrite this little obfuscation and fork it" scenario.
Open Source thrives on its quality and dies from crap like this. People don't contribute to dead projects: they fork them or reimplement them.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Software bombing on a certain date, just so you can charge for "fixing" it is evil.
But that assumes that the software was paid for to start with.
I remember my father adding just this "feature" to the software
of a difficult client that only requested feature upon feature
but had a track record of being months late with their payments
(not very nice if you have a family to feed!)
When the payment was once again long overdue, the client was
faced with a friendly dialog stating that the software was
not paid for yet, and that it would only be re-activated after
payment in full. The payment cleared less than 24 hours later.
It probably would have held up in court, too.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book