Web Security and Commerce

Conclusion

It’s interesting to look back over Vineyard.NET’s first 21 months of operation. On the one hand, we accomplished practically everything we set out to do. We created a self-sufficient company with a fairly large customer base. We created Perl scripts for managing user accounts, generating reports, and even submitting credit card numbers securely over the Internet to our merchant bank for payment.

On the other hand, a lot of the diversions that we investigated never panned out. For example, we have that great software for billing credit cards, but we’ve never been able to sell it to anybody else—we couldn’t even give it away. We spent many hours working on proposals for providing network service to the schools and various businesses, only to be passed over for political reasons that had nothing to do with our technical capabilities. We deployed a cryptographic web server because our customers told us that we had to have one, and then nobody used it. All of that is pretty frustrating.

I certainly learned a lot about UNIX and computer security by running Vineyard.NET. The project added a good 200 pages to Practical UNIX & Internet Security and was responsible for the creation of this book. On the other hand, doing Vineyard.NET kept me from writing who knows how many other books.

As for the value of what we’ve created, I certainly would have made more money working for somebody other than myself. Vineyard.NET can barely pay me $50/hour; on the open market, I could easily have ...