Yesterday our customer called complaining that the software we
delivered to him suddenly stopped working. As it turns out, this was
do to a time-bomb inserted into recent MC engines. They "expire"
on some specific date. We were forced to tell our customer to
set the time back on his computer!! (They do not have net access so
we couldn't just reinstall and engine.)
We are currently experiencing a real bind. We can't deliver MC1.3 to
our customer because our stacks use newer features. We can't deliver
the new "Gamma" version because it also contains a time-bomb. The
person doing the MC development had no idea that there was a time-bomb
(the engine gives no warning, the documentation doesn't mention it).
He fully expected that once he got his application to work, it would
continue to work in the same way. Silly him.
This is the first time I have been disappointed with MetaCard
coorporation. In fact, I had been very vocal in my support for the
company. They have always been very good about fixing bugs or
providing work-arounds for the most serious bugs. My past support of
MC corp. makes this recent outrage more bothersome to me than it would
have if I expectations were lower.
MC corp put the time-bomb in to reduce the number of false bug reports
they were getting. I empathise with their problem. But I think they
picked a VERY bad solution. Their position is apparently that "beta
versions of the engine should not be distributed". (they didn't say
"don't distribute gamma releases" but that is also true) Frankly, I'm
a little nervous about distributing the engine at all! What if they
forget to take the time-bomb out? The number of features (and
presumably, bug fixes) done since 1.3 is huge. Also that was back in
Feb 93. So, if we don't distribute beta releases, then clearly we
should not develop on beta releases (else we might use features in the
beta that weren't in the previous release). The result would be far
less VALID BUGS being reported.
I can imagine several ways MC corp could have solved their problem
differently. I would hope that "stand-alone" MC stacks would never be
subject to "expiration". Expiration should be aimed at developers
(not end-users) since the developers are the people most likely to
submit bug reports. At the very least, I would expect a warning to be
displayed by all engines containing time-bombs (eg. when a beta engine
is started it says "WARNING: This MetaCard engine (1.4B2) will expire
on November 1, 1994").
I am angry because of the bad-will the use of MC may have caused
between my company and one of our customers. The implications of
releasing a product that suddenly fails to execute based upon the
calendar date are abhorant.
Is anyone else as disturbed as I am?
-Pothier-