Even in this day and age, my former employer Inventive Designers refuses to send out an email to all customers when a new version of their (closed source) Scriptura product is available. They only send a notification email to those customers whose bugs have been fixed in the latest release.

The logic behind this decision is that they assume that customers might get worried and confused when they get regular emails about bug fixes. Customers might think "Oh, look at all those fixes. That must be a buggy product.". In my opinion this approach is totally wrong because now I get the impression "I haven't seen any bug fixes lately. Is that product still being maintained?".

Funny thing is that the information about new releases of Inventive Designers' products is available to all customers as long as you log on to their website.

Because they don't send me emails about product updates and I'm getting tired of logging on to the website every couple of days, I wrote a small shell script that pulls the date and version of the latest release from the Inventive Designers website.

The script has been tested on Ubuntu and requires the packages wget and xmlstarlet:

#!/bin/sh

userid=<youremail>
password=<yourpassword>

url=http://protected.inventivedesigners.com/login-drupal.html
xpath="normalize-space(/html/body/div/div/dl/p[1])"

wget -q -O - --post-data="userid=$userid&password=$password" $url \
   | xmlstarlet sel -t -v $xpath

I can understand that software companies want to keep their source closed, but they should never keep their communication closed.