Free Software Inflates BSA's Piracy Claims

crazney writes: "According to this article in The Age, the BSA do not count the effect of free software when calculating piracy rates. The article suggests that free software has made piracy statistics look worse and hence encourages governments to create harsher laws ... Could someone pass The BSA a cluebat?"

Comments

Harsh

[Mr_Silver]

They represent corporate greed, they 'blackmail' companies into paying for huge site licenses to cover all the workstations and then some, or face a 'software audit' in which they'll no doubt find some violations.

Harsh. If you purchase a product then the very least you should do is purchase the correct number of licences. This is the nature of commercial software after all.

Have a 100 machine site license and a hundred machines, but just bought that new desktop for the boss? Lost the paperwork for the server in the corner?

Then you're one hundred percent in the wrong. When you're an organisation you should be keeping detailed records (after all you probably do when it concerns money owed to you).

You can't use lazyness and sloppyness as an excuse for violating a licence. Whatever that licence is.

If someone used that excuse as a reason for violating the GPL, I doubt it would wash - so why do you think it should the other way?