Re: Va. Drop Dead Law

It is very common for beta-test code (even widely available to all comers as freeware) to expire after a certain date. This helps the developer from having to worry about old beta-test versions from being out there after the tested version is released. So, there IS a valid need for code that disables software.

At 12:07 PM 4/6/94 -0400, Kenny Crews wrote:
> ... Disabling may be the
>only effective means for dealing with the commercial
>licensee who fails to make payments. ...

Back in 1973, I was in in charge of software development and support at a small (number of employees) company that leased mainframe software worldwide to the tune of many millions of dollars. The software was a DOS enhancement that most companies relied on completely -- ie. without this software, their entire mainframe stopped working. The owner of the company, who developed the software, had hundreds of places in the code that disabled it at various dates -- the intention being that periodic updates would be sent out to paid-up customers and those updates would change the expiration dates.

Lo and behold, one day while the three founders were enroute from California to Europe, every machine in the world stopped working. I went to a customer site in San Francisco (a hospital) to try to figure out what went wrong. It turned out that the update tapes were sent out too late (or not at all) to be applied by most people and one of the expiration checks hit -- now it didn't hit with any message, it just purposely accessed a feature of IBM's operating system that was known to crash the entire computer (ie. a bug known to the owner of the company that was being used to disable the software).

After finding the problem (with no source code -- the owner was THAT paranoid to even let me have source to the parts that he wrote) I worked up a quick fix that was applied arround the world.

The long winded point: Even the best of reasons for disabling code can come back to haunt you due to either a bug in your code or a bug in your procedures in replacing the code.

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Glenn Tenney
tenney[_at_]netcom.com   Amateur radio: AA6ER
(415) 574-3420      Fax: (415) 574-0546