Beware the techie who takes things literally Time bombs and shareware feature in today's edition of Who, Me? as a boss's big spendy vehicle leaves a coder out of pocket. We start the week with a story from a reader Regomised as "Frank", and a confession from his second job following a disastrous first foray into the IT world. Frank and a freelancing friend were working …
Did Frank tell his boss about the terms ? Specifically that the software would stop working after a year ?
If so, Frank had a CYA.
The way I see it, the boss was aware of the shareware code, and should have been aware of the T&Cs of the usage of that piece of code.
As long as Frank had documented the behavior ...
Yeah, CYA is important. Get stuff in writing. Though if you are no longer employed at a place, where do you archive this kind of stuff? Is it business-related? Is it property of the company? Can you keep it? I actually do wonder about that.
Deleting the whole program? Nah, that's probably a dumb thing to do, satisfacting as it might be. Those were simpler times, though. Today it would land you in deep trouble (and rightly so).
At a previous employer of mine I purchased out of my own pocket a bit of software to help me create macros so I could automate various overly-repetetive tasks to reduce the budding RSI I'd warned HR about.
Because I wasn't using it for commercial purposes, the program's author said it was ok for me to use it, but if I ever left the company then I needed to wipe it from their control. If they wanted to use it, they needed to pay for it.
When I was let go the company did not allow me to remove the software, even when I explained the fact that it wasn't theirs to use any longer. After a month of me constantly harping on them to delete it, but an ex-coworker whom sat in the cubical across from my old station reported to me that they were, in fact, still using it, I finally called the program author to inform him of the company's refusal to do the right thing nor to let me verify that the software was no longer on their servers.
The author thanked me; about a month later said ex-coworker informed me that the company was being taken to court for their stupidity.
In some cases causing your software to time-bomb-delete-itself is a bad thing, I agree, but there _are_ cases where "your" software is only yours by right of contract, a contract which the company you work for at the time is not a member of & thus has no legal right to use it after you & the company part ways.
I remember using a smart grid object that was great, with a lot more function than the standard Visual Studio grid object had at the time (I was coding Visual C++ 6.0...)
But it was shareware and had a yearly renewable licence.
My company paid for the first year, but our boss must have forgot to tell the client about it.
Imagine the wonderful conversations I, being the lead developer and responsible for ongoing support, had with surprised and pretty pissed off users one year later...
It seems the boss had taken a backup, which rightly refused to run. So the deletion or not of the running code is pretty moot - they still had it, and it refused to run the unlicensed shareware.
TBH, in this case I'd have probably paid the £10 myself. Not something I'd usually do, but for £10 ...
If the software was the IP of the company, then Frank is (well, was, water on the bridge now) on questionable ground. Should they have paid the £10 for the shareware? Yes. Was it right to disable the software after the agreed year if a license hadn't been bought? Yes. But to delete all the code is taking it too far. Although it sounds like the boss was rather dodgy himself, that's not an excuse.
Perhaps. Not how I interpreted it tho.
So that's exactly what Frank did. After one year his app would stop working. To be absolutely sure of staying compliant, he also ensured his app would delete itself and remove all its source code.
I took that to mean his application deleted itself (not just the shareware library) and all its source code as well.
.. with two caveats:
- it should have been made clear in a way that was provable that the boss had been informed of this approach. It's guaranteed the boss would have forgotten that in weeks, but it's a good bit of evidence to waive around.
- deleting in full, however, is something I can't see as defendable as it's not his decision - he's not the legal owner. You could make it show a massive popup box that shows the license expiry issue, but zapping the code - nope. If that plan and approach was included in the boss briefing, then maybe, but I wouldn't. Too hairy.
All IMHO, of course. I can see the entertainment/BOFH value, but in RL I'd have major reservations..
They can take you to court, and they will often rely on you being scared off by that or just plain not being able to afford it (yay justice!) but if you get them in front of a judge AND you have solid documented facts on your side then you will win in all but the oddball cases.
Boss c\wouldnt spend $10, shareware guy said OK you can use it for a year, Frank complied with the self destruct condition.
He probably told the boss, but boss being boss was just yayayayayaya OK (I'm not listening).
My responsibility to you ends the moment I am no longer employed by you - No I didn't keep backups of your IP & no I don't want to come back, to rewrite it all & get fired again!
My Grandparents had a term for a boss like that. Penny wise, pound foolish. He "saved" £10 for the shareware, at the cost of having to shut down a demo during a trade fair. I bet that was good advertising.
That said I don't think the Techie is necessarily completely in the clear, unless he explained to the boss the self destruct, and the scope of the destruction. If he did do that though, fair play to him.
I find it a bit uncomfortable working for people I know are ripping off software, after all if they're willing to rip off software (especially affordable software) what else are they willing to rip off?
Yes, that may have been my point.
I did work for a guy doing support for small businesses. One of his clients did not like having to pay for windows licences, as evidenced by all the warnings and black desktops around the office he ran. He found an excuse for not paying for my first visit. He refused to pay for my second visit until the "issue" from the first visit was resolved. I was not surprised to discover he didn't pay for my third visit, or that he eventually went out of business due to the amount of people chasing him for money owed.
I warned my boss after the first visit about the dodgy windows installs. I refused to implement a workaround for the constantly rebooting windows file server on my third visit on the grounds it would make me complicit in software piracy. I was a Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician (for windows xp, and this was in the days of windows vista and windows 7 but even so) and used that as part of my justification. I don't think the client bought it, but I don't care.
I still don't know why my boss sent me back the second and third time, it's not like we were short of work at the time. That said I left that job because of cash flow issues.
The last bit is the bottom line.
Employers who penny pinch are likely to be behind in their superannuation payments. They are also likely to be the kind that gets their employees to use a 'corporate' AMEX card.
Ask me about who is financially liable for the $6000 network switches that you put onto the card when the company goes bust because the employer was the kind that doesn't pay a $10 shareware fee....
I will give you a clue - It wasn't the company......
So I have a clear and simple approach to any financial disintegrity now - Just walk.
"it mysteriously disappeared from the disk and its backup did not work either." - so they had a backup, presumably on a second floppy; these are the days when code could fit on a single floppy after all. My guess is the first copy nuked itself, so they loaded the 2nd copy into the PC and ran it with the same result.
I'm assuming these were just a couple of "install floppys" , they had with them on the day at this trade show
No way a company , even as small and dodgy as this one keeps its entire source code , and backups , for their own application on a couple of floppys. (in the "late 80s" )
I'm sure the boss's new minions could get to the bottom of it later , find the time bomb and , unfortunately, probly reprogram it to keep stealing the shareware.
I still see instances of unlicenced WinRAR running. Uninstall these and install either ZipGenius or 7-zip.
Coders of such tools can do well to allow full functionality during the evaluation period, but after the evaluation period, you can only unzip/decompress archives, and not be able to create any new archives unless you purchase a licence.
Yes and yes — your first two questions aren’t mutually exclusive.
My guess is that you (and I) can still remember that version number because it didn’t change for a long time. (At a certain age, old memories are more easily recalled than memories of what happened yesterday.). In my case, it was the last version of PKZIP that I’d used regularly before switching to Info-Zip’s zip and unzip.
You can remember the exact version number so clearly because for many years, whenever you stumbled across a copy of PKZip on a disk or PC (and it was everywhere) you would check that the version was the "right" one and not some crappy older copy.
It was just so much more useful & effective & reliable than previous versions.
I can even remember PKARC, and I recall the surprise I got from the authors when I registered from Europe - the world of bulletin boards was also not very good at coughing up. Of course they were ripped off gloriously by the phone companies, but that's no excuse.
PKARC extended the time that I could use my 10MB MFM harddisk before I finally had to give in and buy a 20MB one. Given that I now carry a phone which holds 256GB and could fill the aformentioned harddisk with just three pictures I think we progressed a bit :)
fill the aformentioned harddisk with just three pictures
Thats not progress in my book!
Sure drives are bigger and processors are orders of magnitude faster
and what are we doing with all this processing power?
Making sure every blade of grass waves around realistically when playing Farcry ,
and mining for imaginary monopoly money.
capable of accessing the accumulated knowledge of the human race
Or rather, what Google/Microsoft(Bing) want to show you. Which is usually 300+ adverts for products that are dimly related to what you wanted to find out about and little or nothing about the actual subject you did want to learn about other then where it's sold.
About WinRar, which like most other people I have been using since the baby jebus was well, a baby. I thought I should check that I have a license. Turns out I do. Which is great. Also turns out that I'm running V5.00 Beta 8. How is it even possible that's still running and working perfectly on a daily basis? I think it came out in 2013. I should probably fix that.
> Also turns out that I'm running V5.00 Beta 8. How is it even possible that's still running and working perfectly on a daily basis? I think it came out in 2013. I should probably fix that
I've had my licence.rar (or whatever it's called) for WinRAR for at least a decade, and all credit to the company for still letting me use it to upgrade to the latest version.
... and that's probably worth doing, since there was that fuss a while ago about (IIRC) a major security hole in the ACE library they were using. OTOH, the odds of anyone throwing around ACE-compressed files is pretty low, these days ;)
I was periphery involved with a new product. The first beta code drop produced messages like "EARLY CODE: NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE. VALID UNTIL xx/yy/zz".
The customers signed the terms and conditions saying this. 6 months later we shipped the proper product. Customers had to order the product, pay for it and install it.
Two months later on xx/yyy/zz we had a panic call saying "production is down. It will not start. It is producing a message 'EARLY CODE: NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE. THIS CODE HAS EXPIRED'. What can we do?"
The answer was "you need to order, and pay for the GA product. These checks are only done at startup. If you have another instance running. Do not shut it down."
The customer paid his money, and the tape (this was pre internet days) was sent by motor bike courier. Normally tapes were meant to acclimatise in the tape library for 24 hours. This was skipped, and the tape rushed to the machine room. By mid afternoon they had it up and working.
not just once have i seen in operating manuals, or post-it notes stuck to relevant kit "do not allow system clock to pass <whatever> time" on system/business critical kit.
or on patching day, update clock to allow patching, roll clock back.
has lead to some install dates amusingly showing as "<FUTURE>" ....i guess a past tense reference to the current time from the future time understood by previous updates is correct...
https://youtu.be/T0OdNUfuOYk
While it would definitely be the professional thing for "Frank" to make sure his boss knew the house of cards that software was, given the details of the story I wouldn't have any sympathy at all for the boss even if "Frank" never mentioned the time bomb at all. Sounds like a right prick who was likely going to wind up in a similar situation eventually regardless of what "Frank" did.
Betting the old car remained unsold because he refused to acknowledge he was asking too much.
A former landlord, while selling the flat I was living in, told me the market was "low-balling". No, that's the market, whatever wonderful number the estate agents told you they'd get. It eventually sold a year after I moved out (and he'd had to re-let it) for the valuation rightmove had given all along, less than the estate agents had said, but still about twice what he'd paid for it ten years before.
DOS and PC BIOS Support for RS232 was almost non-existent. Being a single threaded OS The BIOS interrupt you were supposed to use would hang the whole computer, also it could only support sending and receiving 1 character at a time. It didn't matter if you were C, Pascal or Basic you had to do it in assembly if you wanted to do it properly and you had to dig out the technical manual out and write your own interrupts. No stackoverflow in those days so most people wrote and suffered the BIOS call. Also a reason lots of old industrial programs would not work properly under windows.
But it couldn't handle the FIFO buffer of the 16550 UART unless you used a FOSSIL driver, and if you used a FOSSIL driver you could use BASIC, or Pascal, or C, or whatever you wanted.... Ah the amount of things that we went through in the old days - back then I ran a FidoNet Node, and I still shudder on how much I spent on hardware.
While there is part of me that says the company was tight in not buying the software, and there is a certain poetic justice in him writing something that destroys itself, he needs to be careful. His company might have something in his contract that says they own the copyright in anything he writes as part of his job.
All in the past now. If they were able or going to do anything, they likely would have by now.:
Yeah, the guy might have been in trouble if they'd known what was going on, but since they didn't he was wise to keep his mouth shut.
That was lucky though, and to be honest, probably would have been better- as much for his own legal sake (more so today)- to have just added a warning making clear the expiral-of-license situation rather than have the code delete itself.
Either it wouldn't have run (and been clear why) or could have been overridden. In the latter case the company would have faced the consequences and nor could they have pleaded ignorance if/when they got sued for distributing the library without a license.
I had made a small application for a production programmer using LMI Forth.
It wasn't interpreted, but turnkey native code running on a very tired, slightly modified IBM PC-XT.
I informed them they would have to purchase their own copy of LMI forth.
Before leaving their employ my supervisor had surreptitiously made backups.
Payback was no-one else there could program Forth if it required maintenance, so sad.
security by obscurity
I'm not sure how it works in the UK but Frank would be in the Bog of Eternal Stench in the US. Retribution and restitution would be the order of the day. If I got the story right, Frank deleted everything. But the parts that Frank wrote belonged to the company. Frank might have been right to delete the shareware portion since the company didn't own that. But the portion that Frank wrote belonged to the company. Deleting that portion was a crime punishable both civilly and criminally.
Frank overstepped his authority.
Before Cloud, dubious. Now it's lawless.
Don't many services evaporate if payment isn't received on time?
Lackspace will kill you over a £13 disputed payment (even if you've previously given them £30k).
Minusnet will kill your landline and broadband if your payment didn't arrive after 6 mins (yes, 6 minutes past might night - before office hours).
Did you forget to (or were unable to) renew your .com on time? Just buy it back for $4k + 'VAT ...'
Trying to make a bank payment? We've blocked it for your safety. It's 17.01pm Friday. Just call us Monday so that you can pay for that hotel. We've blocked all your cards for your safety.
Anyone who has ever spent time creating something useful and then tried to make money, be that music, art, photos or even software, will know that getting money out of punters is like extracting it from a stone! At with software you can time limited to kill itself, music and art don't get that option.
I'm right behind anyone protecting their work and the hard work of others from being ripped off. You might not want to pay but all those skills the creator earned costs thousands in training and countless hours of practice to code, paint, whatever. Pay up or push off!
Good on you on Frank!
I've experienced straightforward software expiration and offer no complaints (even though it can be irritating when it happens).
On the other hand I have never had anything delete itself & my feelings are mixed.
Personally I use a lot of "stuff" and try to keep legal and compensate authors but... I know I'm nowhere near 100% on this.
Even if someone were clearly in violation of terms and deletion was a known consequence... automatic deletion seems a little extreme to me.
One thing I'm sure of, I'd avoid software if I knew ahead of time it had the ability to delete itself.
Maybe not in this specific instance but... I can imagine scenarios where deletions would result in unforeseen, collateral damage.
Wonder how term and conditions would hold up in such cases?
with all the log4j malarky and other Open Source software embedded in VERY expensive proprietary sofyware, I'd like to see a LOT more of this.
I'm genuinely amazed that anyone does Open Source anymore. The big IT vendors don't pay the licences and as far as I'm concerned not ONE vendor should have had a log4j problem, it's because they're cheap and lazy and didn't test or study the Open Source.
Lets see more OS software deleting itself or stopping working if people don't pay for it.
Back in the late 80's the world was a different place. Things like license controls and unique serial numbers registering with an Internet server didn't exist. Yes, the company should have paid for the license. However, it was not our hero's place to enforce the company's agreement to the license terms, especially with a hidden time bomb. He took the money to do the job, and enforcement of ethics was not part of the job scope.
My gut check says.... Our hero has felt a smidge of guilt for the scorched earth. He shared the story here to assuage his guilt and be re-judged by today's standards.
The very earliest Adobe Fonts were distributed on special floppy disks - you could only install said font family (Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc.) on five Macs or PCs. When you installed them, they were locked to the serial number of that particular computer to prevent piracy. Thankfully that particular sales model only lasted a year or so, and later floppy disk releases could be installed without restriction. The early releases were exchanged by Adobe for the free-to-copy versions at no charge.
During this exact time period I was also writing Turbo Pascal code that communicated over serial ports, but since I had also written all the asm driver code needed for this to work, I didn't need any third-party licensing.
However, at the same time I had also written several smaller utility programs for sale, one of them was a replacement for IBM/MS's KEYB program which remapped the keyboard and ega/vga screen fonts so that it worked with a Norwegian keyboard layout and our 3 extra vowels.
The key difference was that my program needed 712 bytes total runtime memory when loaded as a TSR, while KEYB needed 60 kB, making it impossible to load large spreadsheets developed in the US.
Salespeople from a major PC vendor (who merged with another major vendor, their names started with H and C) ripped off my program and gave it to customers who got into out of memory issues, when we caught them red-handed they refused to pay up for a license but promised to never do it again.
Half a year later it turned out they were still stealing it, but now they told the customers to keep mum.
Email from me to my ISP, 1997.
Dear Sales,
Received: from upsmot01.msn.com ([204.95.110.78]) by mailhost.nwnet.co.uk
(post.office MTA v1.9.3b **** trial license expired ****)
with SMTP id AAA162 for <robert@########.nwnet.co.uk>;
Sun, 2 Mar 1997 00:22:56 +0000
Are you ever going to get a proper registered version of post.office ?
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