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."

Comments

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing the least bit controlled about Microsoft's errors, so I fail to see how this could apply to them.

Re:Yet another argument for Open Source. B-)

[CAIMLAS]

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.

I'll play advocate of the devil

[mrjb]

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.