Software Piracy At the Workplace?

An anonymous reader writes "What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated? Bringing this up did not endear me at all to the president of the company. I was given a flat 'We don't pirate software,' and 'We must have paid for it at some point.' Given that I was only able to find one burnt copy of Office Pro with a Google-able CD-Key, and that version of Office is on at least 20 computers, I'm not convinced. Some of the legit software in the company has been installed on more than one computer, such as Adobe Acrobat. Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions. As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities? If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it. When I told management that WinZip has a timeout counter that counts off one second per file previously opened, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money. Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?"

Comments

recommend free alternatives

[gad_zuki!]

Security essentials is free for business, so replace AVG with that:

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

7Zip is free and OSS. Replace Winzip with that. Heck, XP has its own zip handler installed. A lot of techies assumed that XP needs a zip program because 2000 didnt have one. Get rid of it.

http://www.7-zip.org/

PDFCreator is free and OSS. It can make PDFs. Most people just need to make them, not 'edit' them.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Re:recommend free alternatives

[Bacon Bits]

Eh, 7-Zip is a better compression algorithm than it is software. The GUI is not as nice as that in WinZIP or WinRAR (it's designed around Norton Commander instead of the more well-understood Windows Explorer model), the installer doesn't provide the option to associate the files, the association mechanism within the program itself wants admin rights but doesn't properly ask for them so it conflicts with Vista and 7's UAC, the archiver lacks "preserve full pathname" support (extraction support works fine), the context menu component defaults to off, etc. The command line version makes me miss tar, as it lacks the seemingly-basic feature of deleting files after archiving which would make archiving logs so easy.

It's a good program that's fine for personal and home use, but it requires a lot of post-install configuration that is difficult to deploy for a business to get the kind of uniform desktops that make IT life easier. About the only good thing business-wise is that the installer is an .msi file.

I use 7-Zip because it's free as in beer. If I had my choice, though, I'd use WinRAR.

Re:Contact the BSA & request an audit

[gbjbaanb]

Yep, do it. Take the money as a little reward for dong the right thing..

What will happen to the company is: Microsoft will send a letter to the CEO informing him that they will be performing an audit, that they are entitled to do as he is running some form of Microsoft software (I doubt they need to check that's true). Then they will tell him that he needs to run audit software in the company and send the results to MS, and that they know of a few companies who will perform this audit for a reasonable fee, and no, running it all yourself of not acceptable.

Once he's done that, they will check how many licences they think the company needs to become 'compliant' and demand proof they have that many purchased. At this point, they also offer to bill for unlicenced software that accidentally or mistakenly was installed.

End result: the company pays to audit itself, and pays MS for a load of licences. Usually they end up paying extra for things people have installed but never use any more.

They're quite nice about it, if that help any.

Common cause of termination in bad startups

[presidenteloco]

A friend of mine was uncomfortable with using the pirated s/w at her company and so switched her computer and work products
from (pirated) Office to OpenOffice, (pirated) MatLab to Octave, and VBA to python. She also brought the overall issue up with the CEO, suggesting
that the company should pay for its payware, or switch to FOSS.

Needless to say, not long afterwards, she was terminated with some lame excuse but it's clear it was for not being a "team player".

The 95% of the technology startups in our town are laughingly underfunded
(e.g. reverse mortgage on CEO's house and small contribution from Aunt Tilly's bakery), so they have no
money for legit licenses. Unfortunately, the management at many are too stupid to understand that there are perfectly good FOSS
alternatives for all of it.

Let me get past the easy comments...

[HikingStick]

There are already tons of posts saying either "document it" or "find another job". Here's what I recommend.

1. Take a software inventory. Figure out what is installed where, and which license codes/CD keys are being used.
2. Pull records. We get a lot of our PCs pre-loaded with MS apps and Acrobat. Those OEM installs stay with the machines, though many places try to move them forward from machine to machine (thus creating the impression that "we must have bought it sometime").
3. Check online sites, like Microsoft's eOpen site, or contact specific vendors (e.g., call Autodesk or your VAR) and ask them to send you a summary of your current licenses.
4. Document your level of usage against your level of compliance. Include all costs for becoming compliant. Be sure to include one time costs (e.g., buying additional seats) and any recurring costs (e.g., maintenance, back maintenance, reinstatement fees).
5. Educate management that software is licensed, not purchased.
6. Include information regarding the legal liability related to pirated software. Include references to any cases you can find, including actual fines, as well as potential fines (caps). Note the reputational risk to the company as well.
7. Prepare a plan for bringing the company into compliance. Include possible stop-gap measures and alternatives (e.g., limiting the number of users with a specific pieces of software, buying one additional license per year, using OpenOffice).
8. Compile everything into a well-documented report/memo (depending on your company's preferred style), and be sure to present it personally (don't just email it off). Offer to meet at another time, if necessary, but you must make it clear how important this is. Offer to meet with the entire management team. Communicate, communicate, communicate.
9. Let management know you don't plan on blowing the whistle (they'll surely say "nobody knows, so we're fine"), but make them aware that any disgruntled employee could make a call in to the piracy hotline. If you have the intestinal fortitude to do so, you could even make it clear (if it reflects your beliefs) that you value your integrity and that you cannot, in good conscience, help the company steal software/violate contract terms. Of course, that means you need to be ready to put up or shut up.

All that being well and good, you can take some practical steps to start getting things into compliance going forward:

• Commit to buying licenses for all new software requests.
• Keep good inventory records of hardware (and associated OEM software) and software.
• Start buying machines with appropriate OEM software (if small enough where volume licensing doesn't make sense), and consider buying shrink-wrap software on the same order (this might let the financial eggheads depreciate the entire purchase - IANATA)
• Adopt free software that is not limited to home/personal/educational use, like Comodo Internet Security and OpenOffice.
• Pray you don't get audited.