But grandpa always pulled the money out of my ear…

Somewhere around 2004-ish, a feature-bloated VNC utility named Mac HelpMate was brought to my attention by various members of the Apple Consultants Network who simply could not stop singing songs of its greatness all over their .Mac web-shites (see what I did there? That's comedy!). I looked at the product and found that it largely duplicated the functionality of other, more popular and more well established software on the market, so I was baffled. Nothing wrong with “me too” bandwagons in and of themselves—competition’s usually a good thing—but what struck me as odd was that Mac HelpMate’s author, Dean Shavit, felt that something about his entry into the general utility app race made it worth $600 per year.

Luckily, a trial version was available, but upon further inspection of the application’s bundle I saw that virtually all of its useful functionality was being derived from code other people had given away for free (to date, Proxytunnel by Jos Visser and Mark Janssen, Smartmontools by Bruce Allen, msmtp by Martin Lambers, hfsdebug by Amit Singh, memtest by Charles Cazabon and Tony Scaminaci, what appears to be a port of TightVNC by developers unknown, Vine Server by Redstone Software, and even the entire contents of Apple’s own MacErrors.h [a largely irrelevant file full of antiquated error code definitions harkening back to the Pascal days which should already be on most Mac users’ hard drives if memory serves]) which Mr. Shavit had simply glued together with some do shell script events—wrapped up in an unholy buttload of brushed metal windows that took over 60 seconds just to show up on the screen of my then current model G5. Now I’ve worked on ugly, overpriced niche software with an extremely specific target market (cytogeneticists) in the past, but we had some serious-ass NASA PhDs churning out our workhorse code—all of which had to go through regular FDA audits; what was the reasoning here?

Oh VistaPrint, what won't you smear all over high-gloss card stock for mere pennies?

The big draw seemed to be that paying this exorbitant sum would allow subscribers to shove an overcompressed scan of their Lucida laden business card into the application’s splash screen, thereby impressing… Well… Someone… I guess? Admittedly, I don’t do a lot of AppleScript Studio work (rapidly developed applications tend to run anything but rapidly and XCode's debugger has a hard enough time coping with languages people actually care about), so this may very well be a noteworthy accomplishment for those that do, but you’re looking at well under 10 lines of Objective-C for this sort of functionality. That would of course include basic checksum validation to discourage tampering, so you’ll have to pardon my French when I say “whoopty fuckin’ shit” and question the morality of charging this much money for redistributing other people’s work with your name on it when you haven't really added anything more significant than a checkbox to the project.

I felt I surely had to be missing something if all of these presumably learned people—like Bob “Dr. Marketing Major” LeVitus—were singing Mac HelpMate’s praises, so I contacted Mr. Shavit via email requesting clarification as to what it was his product actually did so differently that I was’t seeing. While my lack of contrived introductory banter may have been off-putting for a salesman with little to no technical knowledge of the snake oil in his satchel, the questions themselves were nothing that a developer should have had any trouble answering (how is network traffic encrypted, how are port numbers selected, how much information passes through the bastion host, why were login credentials transmitted via plain-text email, etc). Since I was addressing the product’s author directly, I didn’t think this sort of “shop talk” would pose much of a problem, however the sin of my presumption would soon become apparent as Mr. Shavit revealed that he was far more salesman than software developer, and pretty insecure about his status to boot.

One of the few books Bob LeVitus hasn't written

In his response to what I felt were fairly reasonable queries for those consultants with chain of custody forms or HIPAA regulations to worry about, Mr. Shavit indignantly refused to divulge any of what he referred to as his “trade secrets” and actually went so far as to threaten me with litigation if I dared to “reverse engineer” any portion of his amazing softwerks. Suspecting that this was one of those “pay no attention to the man behind that curtain” style smokescreens indicating that he was simply too embarrassed to ’fess up to his dearth of answers, I pointed out that the open source projects he was borrowing from so heavily did not require any reverse engineering by very definition of the term “open source,” and that the command line arguments his AppleScripts were passing back and forth between these tools could be captured and read by pretty much anyone interested in doing so without any sort of nefarious disassembly. He responded again with more threats intertwined with a sales pitch that made me feel like I had pissed off the huckster mechanic at a used car lot, so I let the matter drop and wrote my own one-button VPN connection establishing software in straight C, which was just as good at punching through NAT as his chimeric monstrosity. While my code technically did even less than Mac HelpMate, I felt it still accomplished more in terms of security, and it cost me nothing but bandwidth. Mr. Shavit, ever eager to either make a sale or have the last word, continued to leave me email and voicemail messages—which I regrettably did not read or listen to before deleting. While I certainly remembered Mac HelpMate as something of a joke for a good long while, I forgot its author’s name as the years went by.

Then one chilly evening toward the tail end of 2007 I sat down to find an AIM message from a mysterious .Mac subscriber blinking at me, proclaiming that he was coming to San Francisco for the big Macworld hoedown and wanted to meet me for coffee to “pick my brain.” People who both live outside the Bay Area and actually pay money for .Mac accounts tend to have needs which I do not frequently address in my consultancy, so this was extremely unusual; here this person was speaking as though they knew me, yet they were clearly not a client of mine. I assumed the poor soul had simply gotten ahold of some bad contact information and waited for him to figure it out, but the messages persisted over the course of several days. I finally Googled the username, deanshavit@mac.com, and had my memory jogged; it was the Mac HelpMate guy again!

Perhaps it is a personal failing of mine, but once someone threatens to sue me for asking them a question, I don’t generally consider them to be my new best friend. On top of that, I’m neither a fan of coffee nor of trade shows, and since I had decided to part ways with the invisibility cloak that is the Apple Consultants Network just weeks earlier, there was absolutely no reason for me to attend this year’s bourgeois black mass at the Church of St. iPhone, even if it was just a 38 ride away. I stated as much (in far fewer words) and closed the chatty little window, but Mr. Shavit was insistent that I meet with him. I ignored his blundering attempts at winning me over with half-assed wit until he finally went away.

Some time later I published a small utility script named “Consultant’s Canary” which I had been using in my own work for a while and finally got around to polishing up for public consumption. I felt that it had proven itself at least as useful as Mac HelpMate in troubleshooting the misbehaving Macs I had encountered myself, so I decided to adopt a similar licensing model just to see if utility alone was what allowed Mr. Shavit to dupe his doting peers out of so much money, or if his enviable success was more directly attributable to the unsavory schmoozing and sycophantry that runs so rampant in his little consulting clique. I amused myself by snarkily dubbing this the “Shavitware” license and waited to see if there would be any takers given my comparative lack of popularity in ACN circles.

Now Mr. Shavit is either a big fan of my website (which would be odd considering the amount of content it offers) or his raging insecurity compels him to Google his own name on a regular basis to find out what people are saying about him; within days I had the following misspelled subject line sitting in my inbox:

Delivery-date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:27:36 -0700
Subject: =?utf-8?Q?Web_Contact_Form=3a_Distrurbing?=
From: dean@macworkshops.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Message-Id: <E1JqgVE-0005n9-J6@sleetmute.khiltd.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:27:36 -0700

Dean Shavit from h-68-166-92-26.chcgilgm.dynamic.covad.net had this to say:

"Shavitware"?

That's not cool - and is actually frightening.

Remove all mention of my name from your site, please. You and I have nothing to do with each other, so I don't see how mentioning me or my software product on your site is relevant or professional.

I don't wish you any harm, but your persistence in this vendetta (what else could it be?) is making me uncomfortable.

I am truly sorry our first communication left you with such a bad taste in your mouth, but you were very aggressive and threatening, coming out of nowhere, and quite frankly, I just wanted you to disappear - and so I blew you off. You obviously have never gotten over it.

Was I wrong to blow you off? I'm willing to consider if that was a good decision, and so, late last year, I reached out to you to have a friendly cup of coffee to perhaps start over, which you rejected, yet you persist (again) in this vendetta...what is the point?

I am no rock star. I don't deserve to have a fan club. I'm just an ordinary consultant from Chicago that wants to do my work and be left alone.

I shouldn't have groupies.

I certainly shouldn't have stalkers.

You and I have a lot in common actually - we're both highly skilled and resourceful in finding solutions for our customers. I actually agree about the Consultants who shill for corporate products to a large degree - that's why we did Mac HelpMate, not to have to be "Casperized" like everyone else.

I'll invite you once again to a real, polite conversation and a fresh start. I have no doubt we could actually learn a lot from each other.

Let me know what you think.

I don’t know what passes for “polite conversation” in Chicago, but shortly after sending this message Mr. Shavit began calling me a “Loser” via AIM and changed his online status string to say something about my being a “putz,” as if that were somehow going to “get” my proverbial “goat.” I blocked him as I would any other spam happy nimrod and did not respond to his ridiculous email for fear that doing so might invite more of this crap, but after relaying the entire ordeal to others over a mountain of Korean barbecue one evening I found that the story was just too hilarious to risk forgetting again. So, Google indices, here I come.

Mac HelpMate's EULA may legally prevent me from disassembling its contents, but as far as I can tell, these ridiculous personal communications are fair game. Let us first turn our attention to what exactly precipitated all of this animosity in the first place: namely, my questioning the monetary value of Mr. Shavit’s software. You wouldn’t think this would be such unfamiliar territory for a person whose own byline reads as follows:

Dean Shavit is an ACSA (Apple Certified System Administrator) who loves to use a Mac, but hates paying for software. Since he's not into breaking the law, his most common response to any cool solution is: "Does that cost money?" If it does, you can bet he's on the hunt for an Open-Source or freeware alternative.

So the self-proclaimed “Open Source Hound” hates paying for software, but has no problems charging his colleagues $600 a year for the privilege of using the freeware (and freeware “inspired”) alternatives his various “hunts” turn up? I had no idea search engines and oversold servers were so expensive in the midwest, but I guess he is a Network Solutions customer, so he’s probably flushing at least part of that down the shitter as pointless overhead.

Relevant and professional is the new fair and balanced

But what seems to have prompted this particular email was Mr. Shavit’s pressing desire to let me know that he does not feel as though my mentioning of his product is either “cool” or “professional.” This seems strange considering how actively he encourages its promotion through the display of poorly designed badge graphics, all of which are decidedly uncool and unprofessional in appearance (a child’s first Flash project perhaps?). And then there’s the way his own scripts “mention” Cocktail—a product he “had nothing to do with”—in what I assume we must be expected to interpret as a textbook example of the sincerest form of flattery. Maybe what he actually means to say is that mentioning his product while portraying it in a less than favorable light is unprofessional. If this is the case then Mr. Shavit would find himself ill-prepared to cope with the cruel realities of the commercial software industry were he ever to market a product to anyone other than his ass-kissing ACN acolytes. I don’t care how much you charge per copy, your code will ship with bugs and you can’t buy off every reviewer out there. Just ask FWB.

Mr. Shavit then assures me that he does not wish me any harm (what a relief!), but expresses some confusion as to the nature of my “vendetta” against him. I’m not sure how anybody gets through what must have been at least 45 years of life without ever being made fun of, but I believe most sane people would agree that there is a fairly obvious dichotomy between a “vendetta” and simply expressing the non-actionable hyperbolic opinion that a given individual is acting like an obnoxiously needy moron worthy of fleeting mockery. I will admit that I have never “gotten over” how a person can sleep at night charging so much money for such shoddy work, but I would not even remember Mr. Shavit’s name were it not for his incessant pestering; who’s “stalking” who again?

Next comes the impassioned plea where Mr. Shavit asserts that he doesn’t want a “fan club” and simply wants to be “left alone.” As my grandmother used to say, povresita. Again, these assertions are contradictory to reality given Mr. Shavit’s penchant for self-promotion, and his position as both a contributor to, and Editor at Large for the hasn’t-been-relevant-since-Copland publication MacTech makes him something of a “limited public figure” in the eyes of the law. Whoring for attention is certainly not a crime, but it’s also not an activity which a person who truly wants to be “left alone” engages in terribly frequently. What I believe Mr. Shavit is actually upset about here is the fact that he doesn’t get to cherry pick the specific kinds of attention his lascivious efforts attract. Beggars vs. Choosers and all that rot.

Finally, I have no idea what “Casperized” means, but “polite” is a word with which I believe I am familiar, and Mr. Shavit has been anything but in his dealings with me. From idle lawsuit threats to childish online harassment, our consummate professional Dean has truly spanned the gamut of impoliteness in my book. Perhaps if I were psychologically arrested in 7^th grade I would be cowering in fear of his bipolar bullying somewhere, but really, you can find more scathing flamewars on Hannah Montana forums these days. I’m counting down the days until he loses it completely and starts threatening to “kick my ass” on the internet dot com, complete with lots of un-ironically spaced exclamation points interspersed with the numeral ‘1’. I can only hope he realizes that my published shipping address is just a box at a UPS Store before the semen-matted headless squirrels and pipe bombs start showing up.

NO DISASSEMBLE!

Despite all of this, my good buddy Deano still wants me to let him know what I think? Well, I think that Mr. Shavit is a very gifted salesman, and like all salesmen, I reflexively assume every word he says to be a lie and see no value in his existence beyond its ability to amuse me with occasionally paradoxical paroxysms. If other people feel differently, good on them; it’s their money and they’re free to spend it as they please. I’ve never met the man nor have I sat through any of his workshops, but I’m sure that he is amply qualified to teach someone how to type “defaults write” and “dscl” over and over again if that’s something that they feel they need help in learning.

I also think that people who are as sure of themselves and their work as Mr. Shavit pretends to be usually don’t fly off the handle and interpret simple questions as personal threats of some sort. Unless he’s paying all of those people to shill for him on the ACN mailing list, I’m clearly in the minority for disliking both his product and business practices. That being the case, why not focus on tending to those who will actually appreciate the attention rather than dwell on the lone detractor whose opinions he claims not to care about? I’m small potatoes compared to these balding dinosaurs; we’re not competing for the same kinds of clients, and since I’ve started keeping my ACN membership dues in my pocket where they might actually do something useful (members take note: Steelcase chairs are a lot nicer than 5% off discontinued Apple Store overstock twice a year), even that tenuous connection is gone. Why persist in these desperate attempts to curry my favor when I’m such a “loser” nobody?

Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that Leopard made screen sharing over NAT so close to idiot-proof that you’d need to be mighty liberal with those greasy palm reach-arounds if you wanted to keep that cash cow revenue flowing as freely as the praise in the great internet circle-jerk of Dean Shavit’s life. Can Mac HelpMate’s hefty price tag continue to compete against the myriad free solutions that gain steam on a near daily basis with nary a line of original code to its name? Only time will tell, but I have every faith that Mr. Shavit will meet the challenges of the future with both knees planted firmly on the ground—leaving no idea unborrowed and no load unswallowed—in order to deliver unto us the same quality of predominantly pilfered software we have come to expect from him. Whether or not he’ll ever figure out how to turn his spell checker on or get his tampon in straight is another matter entirely. There’s always the poetry slam circuit.

I will however comply with Mr. Shavit’s wishes and remove all mention of the term Shavitware from any products I distribute effective immediately. I admit that it was an extremely juvenile attempt at parody which makes very little sense, especially when you consider the fact that I actually wrote all 590 lines of code myself.

And as long as I’m making new friends through Google, I’d just like to say that the douchebags who drive the 1-800-WE-FIX-MACS van straight through every stop sign in my neighborhood can go suck a fat one.