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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?"
Alnd OpenOffice saves $400 per license over MS Office
And how much is lost in productivity, retraining staff, converting between formats, and the pointy headed boss calling you every 2 minutes because Clippy doesn't help him compose his letters anymore ?
Free software is only free if your time is valueless.
I'm from the greater good school of thought. I also believe that people get what they deserve. If the company is keeping people employed then good for them. If he doesn't like it then he can leave. He doesn't have to burn the bridge on the way out.
I have no problem getting the authorities involved when it is warranted. When my neighbor stabbed her girlfriend, I called the cops and I showed up in court to testify. I could have ignored it but I didn't.
Calling the BSA is a dickhead move. I think the OP should offer up some suggestions about how to run the business and avoid licensing costs with FOSS. He should offer up an analysis of what it would cost the business to become compliant with the licensing for the software that they are currently using. It is one thing to see a problem and take steps to mitigate it. It is one thing to realize a problem is bigger than you are, and that you can't affect change and therefore make the decision to disengage from the situation. It's another thing entirely to take it upon yourself to bring trouble to others. Calling the BSA is bringing trouble to others. You can try to justify it through whatever morals and ethics you have, but at the end of the day you're a dick. You're causing problems for someone else. If you find yourself working for an employer and you don't like the working conditions, leave. Only an asshole trashes the place on the way out.
Personally, I think you are a prime example of why society sucks sometimes. You'll wish ill upon others for no benefit to yourself. You wish ill on me? You don't even know me. You wish ill on some company that is providing jobs based on what some guy wrote about their attitude toward software licensing on the internet? Buddy, you've got some karma coming to you.
For all we know the owner of the company could be driving to work in an old Volvo and doing his best to pay the interest on his small business loan just so that he can keep the doors open. Is that the kind of person you want to stick with a BSA audit? On the other hand if the owner is driving a Benz and taking the sales staff out for drinks and dinner on a weekly basis then maybe he needs a dose of reality. In that case the company probably could afford to become compliant with licenses.
In the real world, businesses juggle expenses all the time. Where I work we have about twenty servers and about a quarter of them aren't under warranty anymore. I brought that up to my boss. There isn't any money in the budget for warranties so he decided not to renew them. He made the bet that we won't have any serious problems with the servers. Well earlier this week there was a power fluctuation. One of our servers (that was thankfully still under warranty) took a hit. Even though it was plugged into a UPS, the UPS didn't condition the power properly and the main board fried. The next day my boss decided he wanted to find money to renew the warranties on the other servers.
To draw a parallel between the two situations... by recommending the guy call the BSA to prove a point would be like telling me that it's okay to wreck a file server to illustrate to my boss the importance of warranties. In my situation I got lucky and an act of God proved my point for me. In the case of the OP, his employer will see the light sooner or later. If they really are bad people, they will get the karma that is coming to them. But it isn't the OP's duty in life to cause problems for others.