Imaging Experts

The Importance of Contracts

How to control delays in purchasing your product

The entire software industry has been dramatically affected over the past year with tougher and tougher requirements for protection on software purchases. Corporate legal departments have received a mandate to make demands of their software vendors for greater protection from patent infringement and/or third party (or open source) code that may not have a clean pedigree. Greater demands have also been made for insurance protection for all kinds of risks including data theft as well as property damage and personnel injuries.

Additional demands have been made for source code escrow and code examination for Trojan horses, time bombs, viruses and deactivation routines.  Some companies are even demanding the right to examine a software company’s engineering development process, QA procedures and even emergency planning. They may ask to examine the company’s financials in order to determine whether your vendor will be around much longer. Background checks may be demanded of support and development personnel who might be viewing your sensitive data.

How does this impact the engineering department when procuring software products? Certainly it can cause significant delays in getting your purchase approved.  You may have to do more research to be able to explain to your legal department why you need this product and how much risk the company may incur by its purchase. You may also discover that your legal department has created new policies that your preferred software vendor won’t accept.

What can you do?

Find out as much as you can with regards to your company’s software license policies early on. If there’s going to be discussion over a lot of details, get it started early. If you can discover where your company will bend on licensing requirements that can shorten the cycle. Many companies have a one size fits all license policy that may work for licensing from a Fortune 500 but will not when dealing with a smaller, privately held firm. Talking to your corporate legal staff about the differences will make the accommodation process quicker. You may also be able to give your vendor a heads up to start looking at the agreement sooner, so they can work with you.

Some vendors may be too small to deal with your company. They may not have the legal staff to work with your corporate attorneys or have the experience and knowledge to address your company’s requirements. The sooner your find out, the better prepared you will be.

-Simon

MSJVM - No "Trusted Operations in init(), start(), stop(), or destroy()"

In our applet's startup, we tried to load an image and an associated annotation file from the users local disk. For some reason, the image would load fine, but the annotation file caused an com.ms.security.SecurityException, only in the MS JVM. Everything loaded fine under the Sun JVM.

I looked at the image-loading code and noticed that it was running in a separate thread. I moved the annotation loading to a separate thread and then everything worked great.

After some research, I found some documentation on this issue.

SecurityExceptionEx exception running a Java applet

-Alex

Adobe, AIIM Make ISO Push for PDF

From PDFZone:

"People with differing definitions of what makes an open standard truly "open" will still be able to argue about PDF until they're blue in the face, but moves made Jan. 29 by Adobe Systems and the Association for Information and Image Management will make PDF more closely resemble an open standard."

-Sean

Open Skirmishing with OpenXML

Brian Jones (a Microsoft employee and program manager of Office) has posted a response to an article posted by Rob Weir (an IBM employee and proponent of ODF) concerning the true openness of the OpenXML specification.

The ODF crowd continues to try to point out flaws in OpenXML. Is it out of the goodness of their hearts that they are "warning" everyone about it? Or are they scared it might challenge ODF? Funny that the only "no" vote for ECMA approval was by IBM. When all you can talk about is the evils of the other guy's product, what does that say?

Brian Jones insists that Open XML and ODF can co-exist, and should co-exist. It should be interesting to see whether this becomes an all-out format war.

I, for one, am excited about OpenXML for the simple fact that Office documents (of which there are billions) will be much easier to work with than they were previously, with a readily available specification with which to guide you. Doesn't seem so bad to me.

-Chris

How Open is OpenXML?

This article is an interesting look into the Microsoft Office OpenXML standard, and how it isn't quite as "open" as it appears.

-Sean