Sriharsha Vedurmudi said on Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 12:16:31PM +0530,:
Coming to the concept of Digital Signatures, I have not seen for myself nor seen my administrators bother anything about digital certificates/signatures. "Find a link, download, install and use...." is a very common concept
That is a problem with the people, not the movement, the concept underlying it, this institution, or the technology.
among the vast majority of non-software companies who are interested in using a popular software, if it is free. Now, dont you think that cheating such a company is easy? Honestly, one can mutate a program
You are wrong here. You have a very wrong notion of the community.
(atleast the C source code is in plain ASCII?) and then take the CD to that company saying he/she has downloaded that software and install it (and the company feels happy that their time and money is saved from getting used for downloading it, esp. if its large).
1. Mr. L. User, the boss here, deserves the sysadmin he has.
2. The sysadmin deserves the software he gets.
3. You can verify by compiling the sources yourselves, which you cannot with non-free software. Not even if it is opensource, like the way M$ has offerred the UK government the other day.
(and I say so after having witnessed disasters caused by similar methods). My point here was that apart from
Ah. A /disaster/? Can I have details? Please ask the master mind behind the disaster to give the full source code to his modifications. If you are sure that the guy who modified was acting with malicious motives, why did you not take appropriate action??
On the other hand, if your point is that a guy simply downloaded a program off the net for free, and installed it for you for a fee, well, it is intended to work that way. If you did not get what you wanted, remember, when you pay monkeys, you get peanuts!!!