Wirt Atmar wrote:
> Ken writes:
>
>>What a refreshing attitude from a business.  It's great that your
>> products are so indispensable that customers won't just beat a path to
>> your door, they'll go fetch a machete to blaze the trail!  Most
>> developers have to worry about competition and try to make it easy for
>> customers to buy their product.
>
>
> Without in any way wanting to sound offensive, given your comments over the
> years, I suspect that no matter what we do in regards to licensing, you would
> find reason to fault it. That's perfectly all right. Not everyone will be a
> customer.

Since you've combined the emails from 2 or 3 people here, I think you
are confusing me with somebody else--I don't recall ever complaining
about anybody's licensing terms on this list.  I'm not complaining here,
either, just advising you to use HTTP with the preconfigured proxy
settings so as not to make your customers jump through hoops in order to
do business with you.  I'm just flabbergasted by your attitude that
customers who really want your product will find a way!
[...]

> Given these levels of prohibitions, it seems hard to insure that any one
> protocol is any more assured to be present than another. What one person
> seems to consider to be guaranteed, another says is completely blocked at
> their site.

I guarantee you that HTTP is and will continue to be the most widely
available protocol.

> The basic solution -- as I said before -- is that if a company really wants a
> piece of software, they will find a way. In evidence of that, a third person
> (who works a major government facility) wrote the following to me privately:
[...]
> That's the basically the same level of creativity that I observed when I
> worked at the nuclear weapons laboratories, even though that was 25 years
> before the creation of the publicly accessible internet. Technologies change,
> but people don't.

I can see the headlines now:
   Oct 1, 2010 Wen Ho Lee confesses to buying QCTerm as AICS announces
record triple-digit sales.  "100 paying customers and still counting.  I
told you they could figure it out!" boasts Wirt Atmar.

> But the bottom line remains, I think that the sites that we're talking about
> in this circumstance are very much the exception and are likely to remain
> that way for quite some time to come.

Possibly. I was not able to find any statistics.  Fortunately, there is
a standard, simple way to navigate the firewalls, so you really don't
need to worry about it. (Hint: HTTP)

The idea of using email as a backup is good.  That's the way most
license keys are distributed now.

On the other hand, the only way that telnet is more secure than HTTP is
obscurity.  You can encrypt the body of an HTTP request any way you want
if you are not satisfied with SSL.  You are limited to SSL for the
headers if you want to be able to navigate firewalls.

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