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."

Comments

Same again

[Wowsers]

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.

I have been in an Audit once

[QuantumRiff]

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.

Re:If you're being raided...

[Cheerio Boy]

I'm going to go ahead and guess the violations resulting in a "raid" were far more egregious than your example. More like, say- the company I used to work for that bought a single license of Office 2000 and installed it on 150 users' machines. Had we been busted, I would hardly describe it as a good customer getting screwed because of paperwork. Sorry but in more than one place I've worked the management at the time got info from the other small businesses that got raided. (Customers, suppliers, etc.) The majority of them were raided either because of a disgruntled employee snitching to the BSA or because the business in question was stupid enough to answer one of the BSA's infamous letters and tell told them that they were "in compliance and did not need their services".

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?

tell them to go fish

[SuperBanana]

'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.