It is really sad and ironic simultaneously that "public secrets" are used to make money for a few whilst others have to work much harder (compensating for those who have it easy). In SA if you know someone who knows someone you get keys, contracts, position and so on.
The sad and ironic part is whilst this is the case right now it is proven to be unsustainable in the long term. These people are setting up the environment and country to fail. They are inviting people who operate like this in, and pushing people who are honestly brilliant to other countries or other markets. Every day this continues, the country, our children and their children have less of a future. It is ironic that those who operate like this live in big houses, but their children are going to inherit an impossible economy to innovate, impossible economy to grow and impossible economy to fix the past that their parents created whilst laughing to the bank.
I cannot contemplate using a 3rd party app for my business, because the app and the company would be operating in unsustainable territory if they did not legally and commercially acquire the keys. If I link into that chain, may business will fall down when they do. Likewise if our corrupt history is any proof, our license card, or encryption keys currently printed on them may fall away next year, killing this venture and the other similar ones with it and without recourse or compensation. Anything to do with this sets you up for quick profits and possible long term disaster. Why start if you know you cannot finish?
It is proven that more players in a virgin market increases the market share for their competitors to a larger extent than it divides the market. So more people take part in something like this legally the more awareness and market momentum is created, resulting in bigger profits for every player.
Why can't the keys be licensed legally?
I used to work for the company that designed those license scanners they use at security complexes. The IP for those scanners was sold to exid.co.za when the company closed down.
As far as I know the encoding was designed by a French firm contracted to a South African place that since went out of business, or at least has been transferred to someone else. The company that did the image compression library has also disappeared.
The barcode contains all the text fields that are printed on the card as well as a very low quality mugshot image compressed with a fancy wavelet encoder (Summus WI).
The encryption is sort of RSA512, but implemented weirdly. The private keys are held by the people who make the cards and a few people have the public keys, mostly because they know someone who knew someone.
So basically there are a few people around who have the code and the keys, but I doubt there'd be any official channel to request them though anymore.
