Conference 7.286::digital

    
    1) Write a memo disclaiming responsibility for the sale
    
    2) Apply for a patent on the "hack"
    
    3) Pray it works ;-)
    
    -Ed_being_facitious
    

    You may want to check into ASSETS.  I believe the newest version of it
    will provide a mechanism for letting you know when someone has
    purchased your software.  But, last I checked there was no mechanism in
    place to assure that you or your cost center would see any direct benefit
    in participation.
    
    Steve

>      <<< Note 1626.0 by NEWOA::BAILEY "And we ourselves are not kind" >>>
>                              -< Selling hacks? >-
>
>Whats the official situation about selling internal use only
>'hacks' to real outside customers ?
    
    We're not supposed to sell unsupported internal 'hacks' to customers. 
    Although it may solve a short term problem, it's usually not a very
    good idea.  If a problem arises somewhere down the road, all the
    disclaimers in the world won't impress the customer who only sees that 
    something from Digital doesn't work any more, and they refuse to fix it.
    
    If the unnamed group has source code, and wants to offer some kind of
    support for it, then that's different.  Not a whole lot different - it
    still doesn't constitute a real product.  But just taking an executable
    off the backroom shelf and selling it to a customer, or even GIVING it
    to them, with no intention of ever hearing about it again is, IMHO, a
    bad move.
    
    It's hard to take a single example like this out of context and make
    any realistic judgement, but the general case is: don't do it.
    
    tim
    

    If the "hack" is useful and you really believe it works, submit
    it to DECUS.  Or is that mechanism now outdated?

    I think it's highly unrecommadable to sell this kind of hacks.
    
    It would be better to sell the man to consult it to a customer even if
    he doesn't do anything else than bring his hack there by one media.
    
    If the "hack" is a so called asset, then whole thing is different.
    
    These are only my personal opionons.
    

re DECUS -- that mechanism is most certainly _not_ outdated.

A DEC employee better first have his manager's approval before submitting
something, however.

It can be submitted as a package with its own DECUS order number and/or as
something which ships automatically to all recipients of a particular
Special Interest Group (SIG) tape.

Electronic submission via DECUServe is now possible as well.

(For information on DECUServe, see the conference CADSYS::DECUSERVE.)

/john

  
  Sounds like the old conflict between "Doing the Right Thing [short term]"
  and "Doing the Right Thing [long term]". With the current focus on short
  term satisfaction at cost of long term dissatisfaction, I wouldn't be at
  all surprised to hear that an old .EXE was taken off the internal network
  and given (or sold) to a customer. Any attempt to remonstrate with the
  account/sales/consultant people responsible will be deflected by the old
  cry that "the end justifies means" as their concern is purely to get the
  customer to shut up and smile happily at them for the rest of the week.
  Unfortunately, when it results in the customer being told to take a walk
  because noone will/can support the bodge, the above people give a perfect
  example of teflon shoulders.
  
  This is no different from the well-meaning but very short-sighted people
  who give customers internal kits which might [or might not] solve the
  current customer problem. Digital will usually lose out in the end but
  this rarely effects those responsible for creating the failing situation.
  
  Frank

    
    
    re .7
    
    > ...rarely effects those responsible for creating the failing
    > solution.
    
    How true.  In most cases, the person who sold it has made budget, sent
    to DEC100 and then moved on to another account.
    
    In defense of selling something to a customer,  by what I interpret as
    everyone's definition of a 'hack', most of what we are delivering to
    customers are hacks.  In other words, they are one-offs, designed to
    solve a particular problem, and as soon as the P.O. is used up, the
    support goes away.  The customer should be aware of the fact that the
    code is sold as-is, and if support, bug fixes ,or enhancement is
    desired, those services are available for a fee.
    
    Of course all of this relates back to the original selling team.  Have
    they positioned this piece of code properly, or (typically) as
    something whos capabilities border on science fiction.
    

    Hey folks....we do not SELL our software...never have.  We sell a
    license to use the software, which remains Digital proprietary
    property.
    
    A product has to be "productized" in order to sell anyway.  Like
    a Unique Product Identifier, Part Number, PAC proposal, MLP, CLP
    and SLP established, placed in the Price File, and so on.
    
    I seriously doubt we sold any hacks.  
    
    On 'tuther hand, if the customer is that stupid..........

    
    
    	On the other hand....
    
    	We can sell services using "tools".
    
    

    One of the points made in .0 was that the hack was sold
    to a customer without the knowledge of the hack's original
    author.
    
    This is 
    
        (a)  rude.
    
        (b)  foolish - if you ask the author, he may very well 
             know some good reasons why you ought not to let
             the software anywhere near a customer machine.
    
    It's particularly stupid to give away a hack if you don't
    have source code and you don't know where to get it.  You
    have no way of knowing how long that program will continue
    to work.
    

If Digital is doing T&M services, that's all the customer gets.  No 
guarantees.

If there are deliverables, hopefully, the delivery team has identified exactly 
what will be delivered, the acceptance criteria, and how long the support will 
last.  After that, the customer is on their own.  And all that is documented 
and agreed to by Digital and THE CUSTOMER.  Hopefully...

DECUS software is provided at the media cost and there are no guarantees, 
period.

As a friend's daughter who worked in the restaurant business once said, "It's 
all in the presentation."

    re .-1
    
    Sounds good to me.   However, if the 'hack' is just something
    you found floating around the net, then you probably can't
    (realistically) have any idea as to whether it'll keep working
    for the next 2 days or 2 years.,

When I was a customer, if I bought something from DIGITAL and it broke,
I would expect it to be fixed.

I didn't care whether it had a product number, was a solution tool, was a
hack, was an ASSET, etc.  "I bought it from DEC and I want it fixed!!".

This is simply preserving DIGITAL's name as a quality vendor.  We should
be delivering product, solutions, services which protect our customer
from the hazards of computing (new technology, lock-in, portability, etc)
NOT writing legal contracts to protect ourselves!

If there is a doubt that software will run in the future, then it should not
be sold.  If you do not have source code, then there is definitely serious
doubt that it will work in the future.

Just my $.02.  Fire away!!

-Eric

The hack in question was NEWS.. a cheap 'n' cheerful system noticeboard
system (used by some of the internal system)


Beyond anything else theres a very good reason why not to sell it
... its the wrong version ! (theres a NEWS V3 which is a re-write
of NEWS V2 by someone else)... if anything should be sold it should
be this, and not my 'hack'



(my other 'hacks' PAN , NEWS-NOTES, ROOT et al are much more
into science fiction    :-)        )

    Hmmm, I know of a customer that's had NEWS running on their cluster for
    at least the last 1.5 years. I don't know how they acquired it. I also
    didn't know that it was 1) written by someone at Digital 2) not a
    released product. I thought it was something that someone there had
    written.

    Harry

    re: .15
    
>The hack in question was NEWS.. a cheap 'n' cheerful system noticeboard
>system (used by some of the internal system)
    
    Oh goody!  Think of the joy of the person, a couple of years from now,
    who has been assigned the task of finding a fix for the customer. 
    Imagine his or her delight as he or she not only finds multiple
    versions of something called NEWS floating about the net, but multiple
    *HACKS* as well!  There is *AT LEAST* one other totally unrelated NEWS
    hack alive on the net (I know -- I wrote it).  How many more will there
    be by the time the sold program breaks?  How much time will be lost
    looking for the right version of the right hack?  How much time will
    the Sales Support or EIS person spend getting to know the sold product
    in order to be able to determine which hack is which?
    
    Someone could have oodles of joy trying to support this down the road.
    
    This aside, it is INCREDIBLY RUDE to sell such a hack without
    discussing the matter with the author (to find out if it is stable
    enough to sell, if nothing else).  Plus, if someone sold one of MY
    hacks as a "tool", you can bet your bottom dollar that my cost center
    will want a piece of that revenue!  They paid my salary -- not the
    selling cost center.  It's only proper, IMHO, that some of the profit
    come back the originator's cost center.
    
    -- Russ
    
    PS/ Interested parties can tune into NEWVAX NEWS by reading the
        instructions in note 1588.1.

<><><><><><><><>  T h e   V O G O N   N e w s   S e r v i c e  <><><><><><><><>
    
 Edition : 2424              Tuesday  8-Oct-1991            Circulation :  8249 

VNS COMPUTER NEWS:                            [Tracy Talcott, VNS Computer Desk]
==================                            [Nashua, NH, USA                 ]

 Digital - DELTA: Employee idea becomes a Digital new venture
	{Livewire, U.S. News, 4-Oct-91}
   The following is a report from a series of DELTA success stories. Share your
 results and implementations through DELTA at IDEAS CENTRAL @OGO (DECnet),
 SONATA::IDEASCENTRAL (VAXmail), [email protected]. (Internet), or DTN
 276-8226.
   DELTA is the place to go when employees need help implementing their 
 process improvement ideas. But when the idea is to make or market a new 
 product or involve Digital in a new business, the place to go is the New 
 Ventures Group.
   New Ventures seeks business ideas that will benefit Digital both internally 
 and externally, primarily focusing on what might be useful to customers. The
 organization works with employees worldwide to develop new ideas that yield
 profits for the company and customers. New Ventures provides investment
 assistance and the human network and business consulting platforms that will
 foster entrepreneurial efforts at Digital.
   Tom Wallis, a principal systems analyst in Enfield, Conn., took his idea 
 first to DELTA and was then channeled to New Ventures. He proposed to build a
 business around the natural language interface, developed by Natural Language,
 Inc., of Berkeley, Calif., and layer it on Rdb VMS, Digital's relational
 database product. He also wanted to provide supporting services, to be
 customized on a client-by-client basis. He felt the idea would benefit 
 non-programming professionals by creating a link between the jargon of their 
 own business and the information in their database, giving them an easy way to
 work with the information they need without any knowledge of the database 
 structure. The application syntax is the English they use in their everyday 
 communications.
   Warren Schubert in New Ventures helped Tom with the business start up. He 
 looked closely at the financial soundness of the company, and helped Tom 
 develop a business plan which Tom then had to sell to Gary Carpenter, a New 
 Ventures portfolio manager. 
   Gary gladly accepted Tom's business into his portfolio of Multivendor 
 Integration. More user-friendly products were wanted and the natural language
 was being pursued. Gary gave Tom the financial backing he needed.  
   Tom is responsible for making a profit beginning in the first year, and for 
 communicating his "lessons learned" so that he can help the New Ventures 
 group share experiences with the rest of the company.
   Since New Ventures kicked off the product internally on April 1, and Tom 
 became the Natural Language Systems business manager, the product has provoked
 widespread interest in the company. Interested organizations include Waste
 Management, VMS, Rdb Development, Engineering in Base Product Development and
 Software, Strategic Resources, Personnel. 
   With licenses now in Merrimack, N.H.; Maynard, Mass.; and Tempe, Ariz., Tom 
 is getting ready to market the business externally. Planning to market the 
 interface by approaching individual Digital account groups, he's looking first
 at Texas, where Natural Language, Inc. already has a presence. He also wants
 to link the natural language interface with voice products such as DECtalk and
 several existing Rdb-based applications.

<><><><><><><><>   VNS Edition : 2424     Tuesday  8-Oct-1991   <><><><><><><><>

There's also something called NEWS which seems to be very similar; typically
used to replace long login notices; it's on the DECUS VAX SIG tape.

Don't know who wrote it.

As long as the customer paid T&M to have a specialist come out and install
it there's a good chance the customer realizes he will have to pay T&M for
a specialist to come out and fix it.

If the customer thinks he paid a fixed price (even if it was billed T&M)
then we've got a problem.

It's still rude to sell someone's code without telling them, even though
everything distributed for internal hack use belongs to the corporation,
not to the individual who wrote it.

/john

Re .19:

>It's still rude to sell someone's code without telling them, even though
>everything distributed for internal hack use belongs to the corporation,
>not to the individual who wrote it.

Does the phrase "distributed for internal hack use" have some special meaning
here?  Or are you basing that statement on the fact that almost everything
written in-house by almost everybody belongs to the corporation, not to the
individual who wrote it?

Because if the latter logic were sufficient, I could use it to justify copying
(say) Ed Services course materials for internal use, without paying Ed Services.
And I doubt a wholesale ripoff on that theme would be allowed to stand if it
were uncovered.


My point?  I suspect that despite the fact that most employees' intellectual
product "belong to the corporation", one may not assume that one can walk off
with a copy.  The employee and their immediate management probably have the
initial right to determine the disposition of such material, as a consequence of
their fiduciary duty to responsibly manage the fruits of their labor.

The distinction is rather moot in the case of freely-distributed internal hacks;
that's not the case for all hacks.
				/AHM