Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!decwrl!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk Subject: Re: logistar (logistan?) and Revlon Message-ID: Date: 27 Oct 90 22:32:45 GMT References: <1990Oct27.065504.25303@looking.on.ca> Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Distribution: na Organization: The World Lines: 50 In-Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca's message of 27 Oct 90 06:55:04 GMT I put into my software contracts that putting my software into production, offering it for sale etc deems acceptance (meaning they forfeit the right to do anything but pay up, plus or minus whatever is promised to fix reasonable bug reports, "unable to print to these nifty new printers we bought w/o mentioning it to you" is not a reasonable bug report, for example.) That seems to be what was missing here, maybe. The whole software contracting biz stinks, actually. It's a game-theoretic losing game. The customer is 100% motivated to bitch and moan that they deserve more and withold payment. And the law tends to side with them (mostly because good luck trying to explain your side.) They just list all the things they forgot to spec (oh, they didn't really "forget", when you mentioned it they decided it would cost too much) and how it prevents them from making use of the software and you're basically fighting a losing cause. They only have to keep reiterating that if they can't do this or that the software is useless to them and worth $0, it's independent of how much of your work it represents, or how much it fulfills the original specs. Because of this sort of situation I'm slowly running the other way. It's not worth it, unless you're a scoundrel at heart (or don't mind being constantly accused of being one.) It's possible logistar did something wrong, but having "been there" my guess goes the other way. Revlon probably just decided the spec about being able to "print out reports" should mean "analyze our business, make good recommendations for management, fix our grammar and support any printer we will ever buy...and be useable w/o 1 second training", implicitly. It does seem odd that Revlon has paid only $400K on a $1.2M contract yet seems to be implying that there's enough software there that losing it is a serious problem. They've only paid 1/3 of the price. glork. The point is, you're staring right down a rathole and looking for rational behavior. Good luck! Next try to find out how murder inc. work out contract problems. It's probably much more peaceful. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD