Would You Install Pirated Software at Work?

An anonymous reader asks: "I am an IT professional, and due to budget constraints, I have been told to install multiple copies of MS Office, despite offering to install OpenOffice, and other OpenSource Office products. Even though most of the uses are for people using Excel like a database, or formatting of text in cells, other programs are not tolerated. I have been over ruled by our controller, to my disagreement. I would never turn them in, but I am in tough place by knowing doing something illegal. I want to keep my job, but disagree with some of the decision making on this issue. Other than drafting a letter to the owners of the company on how I disagree with the policy, what else can I do?"

Comments

Re:Stick to your guns and quit.

[Sj0]

I had a whole post written, but the long and short of it is, you needn't worry about the African rain forest. The significant energy and chemical requirements for a bleached Kraft paper mill, and the significant need for skilled workers and on-site engineers pretty much blow the whole idea away. I was reading about an industrial plant with a much less complicated process than bleached Kraft being run in Africa(I know it's a whole continent, but it's not a very accomodating one), and the operators are basically illiterate, and any time they send in a skilled person from outside, he or she gets kidnapped and ransomed. Also, the lumber requirements of making pulp mean that rain forests would make terrible lumberyards. Most pulp is made with the fastest growing trees possible, so the mill doesn't completely irradicate the trees in the area, removing the use of a paper mill in not that many years.

Re:Stick to your guns and quit.

[jonathan_the_ninja]

Well, the breakdown with Abiword vs. Office, for me, comes down to stability. I have had Linux abiword (this is Linux abiword, not Windows abiword, mind you) crash one too many times, and now I've been using Word on Windows for 6 months now and have not had a single crash. Yet with Abiword I had crashes every now and then...(although my brother, a writer, uses Windows abiword for all of his writing and has never had it crash). I think that almost all of us on /. like to say that Microsoft's software is just "bad", but many times it's less true than we might like to think. But when M$ software doesn't work, it's almost always a worse thing than if OSS software doesn't work because there's so little you can do.

Re:Ignore the law. Support your employer.

[fyngyrz]

This experience has led me to real-word realization that most of what passes for law is just bullshit designed to keep someone rich.

...another function is to maintain a powerbase, partially religious, partially straight power. Sorry to hear you were a direct victim of the war against personal liberty.

"I don't steal"... I do copy software. I do it at work if it can improve my personal productivity ... Ditto my graphics image processing software.

You couldn't "steal" ours even if you wanted to, because we refuse to consider you a pirate. :)