Encrypting credit card data

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009, Fairlight wrote:
....
>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.

We did a lot of work with the Unify RDBMS until they changed their
licensing to one with an indeterminate termination date at which point I
refused to ``upgrade'' to the new versions.  We still have production
accounting software running on the older libraries, SCO COFF libraries
dating back to 1991 or so which only run on OpenServer or fairly old Linux
kernels).

It wasn't that I have a problem paying for software, but that I refused to
build mission-critical applications based on software that might stop
working due to something that I cannot control.  At a minimum, it would
probably happen on Friday night, and not be able to get licensing fixed
until Monday.  In the worst case, the vendor would be out of business and
the customer would be out of business.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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