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BSA's Tactics and Motives Questioned
_Hellfire_ sends us over to Baseline Magazine for a longish article entitled After 20 Years, Critics Question the BSA's Real Motives, which paints the Business Software Alliance in the same colors as the RIAA. "A recent Associated Press story highlighted the fact that 90 percent of the $13 million collected by the BSA in 2006 came from small businesses. Since 1993 the group has collected an estimated $89 million in damages from businesses on behalf of its members, every penny of which it keeps. 'I don't know of a business where you can get away with raiding a customer with armed marshals and expect them to continue to do business with you...' said [Sterling] Ball, who shifted his company to open source software after the raid."
It's the same situation in the UK, the little guys get screwed over software licenses that for example, may have expired and nobody keeping an eye on things, whilst the big companies have big lawyers to get away with it.
Should make Linux a bit more of an interesting proposition.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Perhaps a more accurate title would be "After Eight Years, We've Found a Second Person to Put In a Story With Sterling Ball"?
Admittedly, the new guy, who seems to have been knowingly using unlicensed software, isn't the most sympathetic figure, but at least it's a break from extrapolating Sterling Ball to the entire business world.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We got "anonymously tipped" a week after I took over the job of an incompetent admin, who was in charge of all the licensing, and kept telling everyone it was fine to install this and that, when it wasn't. The fun thing was that even if/when you pay the fine, you have to get back into compliance. I remember calling around to MS about some licensing issues for SQL server. Talked to 3 different people, got 3 totally different answers about how many licenses we would need. I read the info from a script, to make sure I was keeping it the same. If the company that SELLS the damn software can't understand their own licensing, how can they expect us to? We ended up having our lawyers and the BSA lawyers figure it out.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
BSA isn't a law enforcement agency, how on earth do they swing armed marshals for their shakedowns?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Either way in a lot of cases the Bullsh!t Stealing Alliance raided them and hosed them seriously for minor infractions.
The only ones that didn't get hosed were the ones that up and paid a fine outright. Sound familiar?
"Bah!" - Dogbert
'I don't know of a business where you can get away with raiding a customer with armed marshals and expect them to continue to do business with you...
If the BSA ever shows up at your door, unless they have a court order, tell them to get lost. If they refuse, slam the door in their face and call the police. Write down every license plate number you can see.
For extra giggles, when you call the police, complain that the people who won't leave are dressed like police officers (the BSA guys wear those black nylon rain jackets with big yellow letters to try and look like government agents), and if they're armed, make sure to mention that too. Cops don't take kindly to people pretending to be them.
Please help metamoderate.
Why did they even let the BSA auditors into their company in the first place?
AFAIK in the UK, the BSA doesn't have any legal powers to enforce such an audit to take place. Microsoft/Adobe/Foo are all businesses and so is the organisation I work for. What gives software companies special privileges to demand an inspection of someone else's business?
If I sell chairs, am I allowed to go to Microsoft HQ and make sure that Ballmer isn't throwing them around, breaking the licence agreement printed on the underside? If a finger can agree to a supposedly legally binding contract, why can't the derrière?
I was told this heartwarming story a few years ago by someone involved in creating the system described below. A very large, well known organisation (call them B) was threatened by a visit from either the BSA or FAST (can't remember which), on the grounds that yet another large software house (call them A) thought that B was using far more copies than they were paying for. B was a very large customer of A's software - they literally couldn't run their business without it, and A certainly knew it.
They had the usual problems of any large organisation - software would get installed and not removed, people would move desks, jobs, etc. They weren't knowingly in violation, but they couldn't really honestly say how many licenses were in use or where everything was installed.
They decided to write a system that would track all the licenses and software in use across the organisation, and allow it to be fully managed - installed and removed on demand. It could handle many different kinds of licensing for many different bits of software. There was nothing commercially available at the time that could do what they needed.
Anyway, after doing this, they found out that not only had they had been over-buying company A's software licenses, the flexibility of the new management system allowed them to have far fewer licenses anyway. Effectively, they had been buying enough to cover installs in all the remote offices, for their more mobile staff, of which there were a lot. Apparently, it was a very pleasant moment when they told A they didn't need any more licenses for the next year or two.
I've never used microsoft (or any BSA stuff for that matter) stuff so it has not impacted me at all. Maybe finally the "suits" will have a reason to switch to linux.
What market are you referring to? The software market? Shouldn't a 10 person software shop with a good product be allowed to charge users for the privilege of having a copy? Or are you changing the rules and saying that software companies are only allowed to profit by selling open source support or placing Google ads?
What, are these guys above taxes as well as the law?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
We were in the same situation once. They sent us letters then showed up. The guys head was swinging from side to side looking at peoples monitors. Occasionally he would do a double take because someones shit looked Windowsy. There is a huge bucket in the corner of our build room with Windows95-XP and Windows Server bundles still in wrappers dribbling over the top and two boxes of crap like office, photoshop, AV software, intuit... ad nausium. My boss walked him in front of the heap and asked, "which license do you want? we usually throw shit away but since your an important person help yourself". The guy actually asked if we had any of it documented. I almost fell over. Every desktop he looked at had Solaris, Linux, or OS/X running on it. My boss looked at him all confused. He tried to explain to the guy, again with no luck, that we don't use windows or windows software.
The guy had to be acting ignorant or something. I think they make money off people being to confused, busy, or scared. It sucks you cant ignore them either because they supposedly act with some kind of government authority. I got stuck listing 200+ licenses for a shop that has under 50 employees.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
It sucks you cant ignore them either because they supposedly act with some kind of government authority.
They have the same "authority" as the RIAA. They lie to the courts and law enforcement and get the cops to do their dirty work.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
either pay for the software that you use or use open source. Sorry no-one gets my support in this type of issue.
A lot of those BSA audits fine people who have legitimately purchased and licensed software.
I know of a company that got nailed because they'd been with a product a long time and gradually growing. So each time a new version come out they bought x upgrade licenses plus y new licenses. After a decade or so and some 7 or 8 upgrades, their last of which was like 150 upgrades and 20 new licenses they got nailed...
They couldn't properly show that every single license had a proper upgrade trail going all the way back to version 1 some 15 years ago. Some one had long since thrown away the floppies and receipts showing that those had been purchased.
Of course the vendor had changed names and been bought out at some point, and they certainly didn't have any records going back that far either.
So some 50 of their 150 upgrades had been ruled in 'non-compliance' simply because they were upgrades of upgrades of upgrades that could only be traced back 4 or 5 versions, but not back to an original purchase in the early 90's.
So, even if you pay for the software that's not enough. You have to cover your own ass so carefully its absurd.
Even the government doesn't require you to keep records that far back.
The BSA's tactics would be roughly akin to the RIAA showing up in your home, grabbing your ipod full of 5000 songs you ripped from your CD collection and demanding you prove you own it all.
So you confidently walk over to your CD's and start handing them over...but you've only got maybe 100 on hand... you put the rest in storage in your basement and attic. Now its a royal hassle... but you start digging through your boxes of stuff and passing those CDs over too.
And when its all done you've found the original CD for some 4900 songs... but you just can't locate the last 8 CDs. Maybe they were in your previous cars glove box when you sold it? Maybe you lent them to your brother? Maybe you stepped on them, broke them, and tossed them? Who knows... they're gone.
Too bad for you: Only 98% compliance... prepare to be fined big time for the balance...
And that's when they look at the stack of 494 CDs you spent the last several hours digging out when they say, "Now what about these? Do you have receipts?"
This in an interesting piece of communication. The author has recently taken an interest in the BSA, including this recent article that promotes their Fear Uncertainty and Doubt message.
Quoted in the fine article are a director of enforcement for the BSA and as counterpoint noted analyst Laura DiDio. Ms. DiDio was originally famous for her role promoting the Amityville Horror hoax. These days she is perhaps better known for her astonishing (and curiously persistent) analysis of the SCO debacle in which she promoted SCO's position in front of the press and wound up a creditor in their bankruptcy(pdf) for her trouble. Her employer is alternately given as Yankee Group and G2 Computer Intelligence.
One can only wonder whether Erika Chikowski bothered to check her sources or if this is a case of envelope journalism.
I read all the way through the article. I want my five minutes back.
If you're going to trudge through it at least skip the ads and vote it down.
And this would be a worthwhile part of the article if she hadn't omitted the final "Word document".
I am not saying "guilty until proven innocent" or anything like that.
Well if the BSA comes around you better believe they are operating under than philosophy.
My point is that if someone is tipping off the BSA then SOMEONE at your company realises that you are not in compliance.
Copypasta:
It couldn't possibly be that it's a disgruntled ex-employee who called in a bogus tip simply to harass their former employer. It couldn't possibly be a disgruntled ex-employee who was themselves responsible for the licensing and thus the lack of compliance, and they were the only ones who knew it.
Not copypasta:
Actually that last one has happened, I know of one case where a guy brand new to an IT job discovered that the guy he was replacing, who had been fired, had done a lousy job of keeping up with necessary license documentation. That being a big part of the job description and thus solely that person's responsibility. And then, lo and behold, an "anonymous" tip caused the company to be hit by a BSA audit for which they were completely unprepared. Despite, to their knowledge, having properly paid of all software and simply not being able to produce the documentation.
The enemies of Democracy are
I was a few years ago but I remember someone was threatening school districts across the country with some kind of audit which would have cost at the low end 10's of thousands of dollars and 100's of thousands for larger districts. Something about the Microsoft EULA or the BSA comes to mind but the real story was how the LTSP( Linux Terminal Server Project ) came to the rescue and stopped it. The timing of the threats was poor because there was some national conference around the time and the LTSP group met with many of those threatened. Some jumped onboard with LTSP and off Windows ASAP and others told Microsoft they were going too. Microsoft sent out apology letters and tried to make it look like a big mistake but the end result was that a handful of districts switched to Linux and the others did not but were left alone.
I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up since if it wasn't the BSA directly, it was Microsoft and those two are tied at the hip with how they do 'business'. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I'm curious as to when your audit was. The one I describe was in 1999. They may have changed practices since... Or you might have gotten lucky... Or somebody higher up on the chain from you might have greased some palms...
And it's not a matter of "agreeing." It happened exactly as I described.
For the conspiracy theorists out there, I'd like to add that the servers at said company ran Linux, even though the workstations were NT.