Geek Noise
Rants, rambles, news and notes by Peter Provost
19

Orrin Hatch Pirates Software!

Thursday, 19 June 2003 03:18 by Peter Provost

"AaronX" points out this post on BoingBoing

Senator Orrin Hatch's website uses a very impressive set of Javascript code for its menus, developed by Milonic Software. A professional developer's license is $34.99, and a corporate side-wide license goes for $899.00. However, non-profits seems to have access to the code for free as long as a license number is obtained. (...) So, does Orrin Hatch and his web support staff have a license number, or is he guilty of using unlicensed software himself? There's a "* i am the license for the menu (duh) *" comment in the View - Source, but no license ID number. Strange. Bigwig suggested to me that I compare his site's code to a licensed site's code. So I checked The Warren Human Society... no tag in the HTML mentioning licenses with a (duh)...

Not only does he not include a link to the software's home page, but his software's out of date. Close enough for government work, I guess, and he's too busy threatening to blow up copyright violators' computers to have his technicians maintain their systems (the software is actually up in the 3.4.x release level now, if I'm correct) Since I'd hate for one of the representatives of my country to be caught as a hypocrite on such an important issue (well, except for Robert Byrd, but after all these years he probably can't find his Klansman robe), I've sent a note to the author of the software...

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