Dealing with Software Vendor Failure for Vendors #risk

I have a confession, I am a former software vendor, I’ve worked for software vendors as a consultant, and I’ve been guilt of delivering a solution which didn’t work as advertised. This is sadly an all too common occurrence which can be due to many things which I will not be discussing here. Here I will identify some of the common pitfalls that all vendors face, and what can be done to reduce and mitigate the risks these pose.

There are a number of pitfalls that a vendor can fall into when addressing the issue or the customer, Groopman calls^[1] these the 3 A’s:

6 Months of Security Links #2011

I’m a regular curator of daily links, and like to give overviews of my collection of curated links and posts. This is partly as there are some good sources and articles in here and as I am working on a research project which I started based on a number of books I read.

I’m sure you’ll find something interesting in the items below – there are some gems in the list – and I dare to hazard the guess you might learn something you wanted to know. 🙂

Due Diligence: Dutch Financial Handlers

As part of the due diligence of a project I was investigating at the end of 2011 I created a list of the Dutch Financial Handlers which were able to do electronic invoicing and paper invoicing. Although the list was incomplete I was able to give advise to the company I was working for, afterwards I closed the file and forgot about it.

Yesterday and this morning I discussed the value which could be created by sharing this information, and making it possible to modify this data by third parties. After considering the value of the data, which is freely available from difference sources – also included in the file – and the advantage to all I decided to release this under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.

Image source: Bill McKay

Proof of Concept: Rebranding GPL #opensource #foss

Recently I read an article on /. about the rebranding of Blender, this was a reaction to the press release from Blender, the comments mainly focussed on theft of the IP by rebranding. This was because the article was slanted towards the IP theft of GPL software.

I am an advocate of both GPL software and earning money, although I see the later as a necessary evil. And as I have mentioned before Free and Open Source Software is certainly NOT free as in beer and will never be. Taking the example of Blender, there have been people who have used Blender to create projects which were for profit and similar to the trickle down effect which the GOP advocates there should be a trickle down effect in FOSS, even if it is only morally.

I think its sad that there has not been anybody who has an app store for GPL’d software, where I could sell scripts or small programs and make the source available only once they have paid. There are lots of places that I can have my items downloaded for free, and nowhere for somebody to pay for them with Paypal or Bitcoin.

Image source: Bill McKay

Microsoft Office Installer woes #fix #installer

For the last couple of months my copy of Microsoft Office 2003 had become corrupted, naturally the OEM vendor’s solution was to use the disk provided and just overwrite the whole installation. This machine is my primary machine and although I don’t use Office very often, preferring Google Docs, I do use it.