I used to ponder this question. Most of the theft horror stories that I encountered as a software entrepreneur in the nineties involved "them furriners." I was too much of a non-jingoist to subscribe to a belief that all them furriners were less honest than us good ol' 'mericans. I searched for another explanation.
I thought about the distributors I had known and finally arrived at the explanation that "selling invisible 1's and 0's that belong to someone 5000 miles away across the pond" was a field that tended to attract the dishonest. Don't really know -- just a possible hypothesis. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Phil Smith Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 1:10 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Auditing vendor source code Ed Jaffe wrote: >We once had a situation in which a foreign distributor had numerous "off-book" customers using our software illegally. It's not clear whether the customers actually realized they were pirating the software. In any case, the implementation of so-called "keys" put a stop to all subsequent attempts at deliberate or accidental misuse (as far as we know, of course)... As you note, "as far as we know". If the distributor was that dishonest, I assume this meant that the US folks had to handle all keys? I bet that was fun...lots of off-hours calls! Yeah, the only argument I've ever heard that had any teeth was related to them untrustworthy furriners. Though I suspect it's less that foreign companies are less trustworthy than that American companies are more afraid of litigation... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
