At 04:33 PM 9/4/2001 -0700, John Young wrote:
>Look, I'll accept that we will all succumb to the power of the market,
>so limit my proposal for full disclosure to those over 30. After that
>age one should know there is no way to be truly open-minded.
And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I'll mention that at C2Net we did
sell our software to the government/intelligence agencies who wanted it -
they paid the same prices as any other customers, signed the same sales
contracts (we'd negotiate some on warranty terms for big purchases), and
otherwise got what everyone else got - not more, not less.
In the book "Peopleware", it's argued that software quality is important
not because customers demand it (they don't), but because it makes
developers happy to make something they're proud of, and happy developers
are more productive and are retained longer. I thought then (96-98) and
still think that it might be sensible for small crypto/privacy
oriented-companies to refuse to sell to government bodies - not because it
would realistically prevent the TLA's from gaining access or information,
but because it would be a good marketing trick, especially back when the
LEO/intel agencies were 100% behind Clipper and very restrictive
export/escrow policies. In terms of customer and employee morale, it might
be helpful to be "that company who tells the government to fuck off for
moral reasons", which is something that ideological leftists and
ideological libertarians can get excited about, and excited customers and
employees are good for business.
It also might be a sensible posture for a small, fast-moving high-volume
company that doesn't want to fuck around with the overhead involved with
government sales - they typically took 2x or 3x as long to close as
private-sector sales, and had extra mandatory forms to fill out where they
wanted to know about the race and gender of the business owner(s), and then
paid us on 90 or 120 day or worse terms because what were we going to do,
sue them? On the other hand, it also looks like a good opportunity for a
captive government reseller subsidiary, which has a couple of really
laid-back slow people on staff who don't mind filling out forms, and charge
2x the regular retail price (which is available only to cash/credit card
customers) in exchange for waiting 120 days for payment. But we didn't have
spare cycles to fuck around with that, though some companies do, and they
seem to do pretty well with it.
--
Greg Broiles
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids
