NewsForge: Why Proprietary Software is Dangerous for Business-Critical Applications

“A friend of mine is the IT manager for a medium-sized wholesale
distribution business. One afternoon in early August, a hard disk
drive in one of his employer’s servers started to show signs that
it was dying. That hard drive contained the company’s (proprietary)
credit card processing software, which was chosen specifically to
integrate with the company’s (proprietary) inventory control and
accounting software package. My friend–we’ll call him Stan–didn’t
think the problem was a big deal. He’d just reinstall the
card-processing software on another hard drive, move the customer
data he’d wisely backed up onto the new drive, and go home for the
day. That was before he called the software company that had sold
his employer the card-processing program–a call that left Stan and
his boss angry and confused…”

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