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Business Software Alliance "Grace Period"
The BSA is running (until January 31) a "Grace Period" for "voluntary compliance" in the cities of San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, Houston,Norfolk/Richmond, Nashville, Indianapolis, Bozeman, and Orlando. Small businesses recieve a card in the mail, having been assigned a tracking number, so you know you're in their files. In previous press releases they state that they send out up to 700,000 of these cards simultaneously. Scanning their reported settlement victories, they then seem to pick 2-4 business to destroy. If the businesses don't go along, the BSA hires the Federal Marshals as mercenaries to help ensure compliance with their extortion. Microsoft, unsurprisngly, is a big supporter of this and pushes it to vendors as a chance to strengthen customer relations. (this is a powerpoint document, but thankfully you can also have it: translated via google). CD: Here is a link to the press release on this matter.
I run a one person operation out of my house and I got one of these letters. What do they do, go down the list of businesses in an area and figure EVERYBODY is pirating their software? I am ingnoring everything they send me. If they want to send a federal marshall to my house, I will see their ass in court. I haven't run windows for about 2 years now, and have never had any employees to rat on me for using "illegal software." Pirate my ass. More than anything this makes me want to start doing file sharing on every piece of software I own.
They offered to help me track down potential license infrigements. And certainly, I could provide him with a list of software I'm using.
The comical effect was lost as the clueless telemarketer could'nt find "lunix", "apache" and "perl" in his list.
"It's open-s... nevermind, I have a meeting bye"
" No matter how you hype it, it's just not legal for a company to own (or sometimes not) a single copy of Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office and run it on 10's or 100's of computers. Somebody has to enforce the law or it breaks down. "
This somebody is supposed to be the "police" and "justice", or it breaks down.
"Incedentally, it's the same copyright law that keeps your GPL software free that they are protecting! "
The GPL uses the copyright system against itself. Without copyright, there would be little need for GPL.
My boss got a letter from these dweebs. He owns the business and he had me look at it, since I'm a top employee.
We thought to have someone file an anonymous report and draw them over here. Just for laughs.
I am the chief technician, and got this job by offering to put all his legal records on a SQL database. I got him set up on a Linux based network and now he gets his data via a web based app that he can access at work, on the road, or wherever. We even have a Linux based file server.
Three workstations are here and they all run RedHat and open source software. Even the secretary has no problem working with it. KOffice, and konqueror. With KDE, who the fsck needs Windows? Our secretary put on her dumbest hat and had us tweak her workstation for all of 2 hours to make it even more comfortable and easy to use than her Windows box at home. She hasn't seen an application crash in like forever.
Bill Gates wept.
Setting up a business with Linux is so easy. A baby could do it. We sent a reply to the BSA stating, basically, that we use open source software and dweebs like them will make sure we evangelize other businesses to do the same.
And we back that up. I have 2 contracts to fulfill this month and next... both are businesses that want to chuck M$ and go with RedHat.
It's free, and doesn't report anything back to anyone.
In other words, it's not spyware or adware.
Actually a pretty useful tool.
Not only tells you what you have on your system,
but reports free memory slots and current CPU speed as well.
Print the output, use as a handy reference.
Should you ever reformat, the list might come in handy.
You'll likely discover software you didn't know you had.
Recently the management in the company I work for has started to talk about using Open Source software a lot more. Not because it is "better" but because it makes the bottom line look good.
:)
I suppose the fact that the "bottom up" approach of getting OS software in has something to do with it as well. One of the few projects that went in on time and on budget used java and OS instead of MS languages and tools, the fight we had to get the go ahead for not using MS tools was unreal.
Now I have management high up wanting to move our web based systems to OS, also we want to run Linux on our mainframe. Strangely enough we now have the capacity since fronting the former proprietory middleware with an OS based XMLRPC system.
It's slowly changing from fighting to use OS into becomming a no brainer for the higher ups. Especially as a lot of recent licencing changes have stung our bottom line.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
You're right. About 4 years ago our company was about 50 people small, and we got an opportunity to become a MCP (Microsoft Cerified Partner), because an MCSE joined our company. At that stage it sounded great, the marketing people really liked the idea of being a "Microsoft Partner" and on top of it we got a buch of software licenses with the deal. It included (but was not limited to) an exchange server with 50 CALs, SQL server with 50 CALs etc etc. So ofcourse when later that year we started investigating a new mail server exchange was the obvious choice. It had everything we need, plus a buch of other "cool stuff". Up till then we were a Novell / Linux shop on the server side. So we basicially start using exchange 'cause we can do it for free and exveryone's happy (it's actually quite stable any everything). The next year, however, we want to renew our MCP program. Only this year we only get 1 Server (instead of 5) and 10 CALs. Which means for us and our branch office we have to buy 2 licenses of WinNT + Exchange + 40 CALs. Quite expensive for a small company. Forward back about 3.5 years and we are 250 people and MS sends us 'scare letter' and we have to buy about 200 NT + exchange CALs. Also a lot of money. In any case, there's no way getting rid of exchange now. Worst decision I ever made.
Doing a search for BSA at the US Patent & Trademark Office yielded 64 trademarks with BSA in it, including this BSA, the Boy Scouts, & others.
Copyrights only protect a specific document. So if you write an article about the BSA (acknowledging their trademark of course) the article's copyright belongs to you. Just look at the bottom of each page on
Logically that argument holds water only if you were going to provide them with that revenue had you not violated their copyright in the first place. Hence if I illegaly copy a program that I wouldn't otherwise have bought, then I have not deprived the retailer of any revenue or potiential revenue.
Now this has little to do with theft as such. Dictionary.com gives the following definition of Larceny:
Now the property you're refering to here is money. The copying of the software is clearly not 'stealing' in the sense above, since you do not deprive the owner of his software, he still has his copy. However, you're clearly not stealing his money either, since he still has his software to sell. What you may or may not have done is deprive him of possible future earnings, and that's a different crime entirely. It's called copyright violation in most of the world, and is still a crime.
Why is this important? Well, words and their intended meanings are the only means of communication we have, and going around calling copyright violation 'stealing' is akin to calling "driving while under the influence," "possession of narcotics with the intent to sell", or calling "murder", "tax evasion."
Such usage can only serve to dilute the commonly understood meaning of the words we use to communicate, and those who do so intentionally, in order to further their own agenda, deserve nothing but contempt.
Stealing software is when you grab a copy of Windows from the shelfs of CompUSA and exit without paying for it. Copying the same software off a server somewhere is a different crime entirely.
Stefan Axelsson
Perhaps you want to live in a society where everybody has free reign to invade your life to verify that you are indeed not breaking any laws, but I'd sure as hell live in one where I was presumed *innocent* before proven guilty, not the other way around. The BSA should not be able to use scare tactics to single out and destroy arbitrary companies. Do you think this is a good thing? They should either bring lawsuits against ALL companies, and either lose the suits or engender so much bad will that nobody will every want to use their products, or not bring any at all. Any one company should not be allowed to scaremonger and arbitrarily cripple other companies by yelling "fire" in the free market.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
you mean the microsoft software inventory analyzer? yeah, my company just finished with it. we ran it three times over the course of two weeks to get a good read on what products we have. it doesn't *appear* to be spyware, and it makes lists of what you got in HTML, .doc, or .xls formats. the software gets classified two ways; one, by product name (ex: Microsoft Office 2000 Pro), and by file location/name (ex: msoffice.exe, winword.exe, excel.exe, etc.).
the bottom line is that if your company really has been fudging some of the licensing numbers (like mine has), probably out of laziness, this software does work pretty fast, no bugs that we could see. 'course, it would figure that the only bug-free MS program we now own is the audit software. nothing like a good ROI, you know?
No matter how you hype it, it's just not legal for a company to own (or sometimes not) a single copy of Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office and run it on 10's or 100's of computers. Somebody has to enforce the law or it breaks down. Incedentally, it's the same copyright law that keeps your GPL software free that they are protecting!
Absolutely wrong. You can download a sigle copy of a GPL program, modify the source, and install it an as many computers as you like. You dont have to give your changes to anyone eles either.
ONLY if you want to distribute the modified code outside of your company, then you have to attach the source & license.
The GPL does not cover USE of the software- only redistribution. You can use the software however you like.
The government cannot? What are income taxes. Does "Voluntary Compliance" sound familiar? How do people lose their belongings and get stripped of their savings? No warrants are even necessary for the IRS to do it either. Troube? How can the government get in trouble when the executive and judicial branches are corrupt. The legislative branch is just clueless.