Encrypting credit card data

[Fairlight]

This public service announcement was brought to you by Bill Randall:
> > I'm not in charge of upgrade decisions.  I do know people have refused
> > to upgrade based on issues with 5.0.15, much less 5.6.  I know people
> > that are sticking with 5.0.14 even though .15 has bugfixes, strictly
> > because of the license manager backport--legitimate paying customers
> > that have nothing to fear but don't want to deal with the headache.
> > One can't really blame them after hearing stories like the post from
> > the weekend where someone downloaded a new license file that had 0
> > licenses. :/
>
>
> The issue was that the data for the MAC Serial Number was inadvertently
> typed into the Domain Name field of the license manager.  That was
> quickly corrected shortly after the email was received, even over the
> weekend, and the corrected license, which was emailed to the customer,
> worked fine.  It was not a case of 0 licenses.  Most 'stories' are
> similar.

You're either not getting the point, or I've been unclear.  I'll try again
with as few words as possible:

"People do not want to deal with license managers."

This can also be summed up as:

"Undue burden upon paying customers."

</few_words>

They pay for the software, they have expectations of being able to "just
use it".  They don't feel a need or desire to jump through hoops, fill out
forms, look up MAC addresses, etc.  They don't want to have to call or
email support to be able to recover use of their software after they've
already had 2-12hrs of downtime because of a hardware failure, just to make
their software work right with new serial numbers or addresses on hot spare
hardware in a 24/7/365 environment.  And especially (and this goes back to
the WordPerfect on SCO days, and probably before) they do not want an extra
process sitting there just to handle licensing.

While the big companies can get away with imposing upon their users,
filePro's user base size does not afford fP the luxury that people will
suffer it lightly--or silently.  Does fP-Tech really need -bad- publicity,
when it's practically the only publicity they get?

And to be honest, I've heard of so many problems in the last year or so
getting ahold of fP support, it would seriously give me pause as the owner
or CTO of a company putting in something with such schemes and having heard
that support is not exactly snappy.

Overall, the new licensing scheme was a bad idea at conception, and nothing
has been done that makes it a good idea for anyone except fP-Tech.  I've
seen worse, but !worst != good.

mark->
-- 
"I'm not subtle. I'm not pretty, and I'll piss off a lot of people along
the way. But I'll get the job done" --Captain Matthew Gideon, "Crusade"