4 ms·
Wow, based on the numbers in the linked article, these guys sold ~750k copies of the software which retailed for around $35 in 1995. Even if you assume it sold
by eigenvalue 4y ago
Wow, based on the numbers in the linked article, these guys sold ~750k copies of the software which retailed for around $35 in 1995. Even if you assume it sold at wholesale for half that price, it’s still something like $13mm without inflation adjustments, or around $25mm in current dollars. That’s a huge amount of money for an outright fraud. They really should have put people in jail for this. Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product.
- ryandrake 4y ago> Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product. Why not the devs, too? Didn’t they knowingly implement the fraud?
- AlexandrB 4y agoExecutives take a lions share of the upside, shouldn't they shoulder the downside?
- eigenvalue 4y agoI think this is a bit different from the case of, say, the programmers who made the fake accounting software for Madoff, where it was completely obvious that it was a fraudulent application. Here, if they had actually used a real compression algorithm instead of memcpy, maybe it could have sort of worked. And they split the job up into different parts, so perhaps it wasn’t so clear to the devs that it was fake.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago> Maybe not the devs, but the management that knowingly shipped a defective fake product. This was the era of software where a product could have a single developer. That developer might have also been one of the key business leaders. It is funny to see how much modern software development has expanded to the point that nobody can imagine single developers making a product (especially a nonfunctional fraudulent product) alone.
- mperham 4y agoSome of us solo developers are still alive and well and making plenty of money selling software.
- stuaxo 4y agoThey could have used the cash to fix it !