Official Anonymizing

[Greg Broiles]

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
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids