Tim May wrote:

At 1:26 AM -0700 6/15/97, Tom Weinstein wrote:

...

Just to be clear, we didn't give the blackmailer any money. As Mike Homer put it: "We don't bargain with terrorists."

(What the Danes offered was a straight buiness deal, albeit made weirder and more frantic by the constraints of time, publicity, and worldwide attention. Still a business deal, though. When Collabra wanted X dollars to be acquired by Netscape, was this also "terrorism"? The term "terrorist" hardly applies in business deals.)

As Tim almost points out, people who use their own time, resources and money to examine your product and discover weaknesses in it which can be corrected in order to make it a better product hardly qualify as blackmailers (unless a company considers that their in-house QA staff is "blackmailing" them to receive a salary). (Pay attention, Netscape--major CLUE coming up...) It is not the consumer or user's job to keep track of what the company who produces the software deems to be "proper" use of the product they have bought. Likewise, it is not the job of computer analysts and researchers to search out the flaws in a profitable software and give away their knowledge so that the producer of the software can maintain or increase their profits. If the people who discovered the flaw had wanted they could have chosen to sell their knowledge to Microsoft for probably a very substantial sum. Can you imagine the embarassing position Netscape would be in if Bill Gates made a press announcement about the Netscape flaw and informed the public that a "Netscape fix" was available at microsoft.com? TruthMonger