the problem with rogue crackers
Their "work" imposes opportunity costs on software development efforts.
They by themselves don't have the ability to defend a statement like
"fixing this security hole will be more economically beneficial to society
than those features software development people were working on
implementing". Some of those rogue crackers are also only interested in
their own economic benefit to the exclusion of the rest of society. What
makes all of this worse is that specific first level cancelled feature
additions are the only ones any software developer is in a position to
document as being lost because of cracker activity. None of the follow on
features that may have been requested and implemented as a result of new
users using those first level features will ever be known.
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