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Recession Turning Software Auditors Into Greedy Traffic Cops
judgecorp writes "As the recession bites, software auditors are cracking down, and some are simply exploiting loopholes and technicalities to meet their targets, according to analyst Forrester. They may be within their rights, but they aren't endearing themselves to users; Steve Ballmer faced weary customers in London last year, and admitted Windows licenses have deliberate 'gotchas.'"
They may be within their rights,
What right would that be, exactly? If they're not law enforcement, and they don't have a court order, they have zero "rights." Yes, even if they show up wearing fancy raid jackets to try and look like law enforcement.
I've posted this several times before. If the BSA or any of these other vultures come knocking, they have ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT TO DO ANYTHING, SEE ANYTHING, TALK TO ANYONE, etc WITHOUT A COURT ORDER. If they have one, that means you're already in the process of being sued, and the first person you should call is your lawyer, and you should ONLY do EXACTLY what the court order requires you to.
Here's the Superbanana Super Guide To BSA Bullshit Shutdown.
If they don't have a court order, don't let them see anything, touch anything, install anything, connect anything. Don't answer any questions. The only information you should give them is your attorney's phone number.
Please help metamoderate.
I don't use ANY proprietary software at my company.
This is great for anyone who can get free software to do their bidding. For everyone else, this really pushes free software into the limelight in a good way (e.g. - we'll use it until we see the value and THEN we'll pay for the "enterprise" support).
Adobe products apparently "phone home". My former employer was just approached by Adobe about some unlicensed copies on the network (the users have full admin rights, per most Windows environments). They settled out of court for $2 million (USD) but immediately dropped Adobe from the suite in favor of free software.
Kudos to Adobe for screwing themselves so bad.
4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. Any such audit shall only take place during Customer's normal business hours and upon no less than ten (10) days prior written notice from Red Hat. Red Hat shall conduct no more than one such audit in any twelve-month period except for the express purpose of assuring compliance by Customer where non-compliance has been established in a prior audit. Red Hat shall give Customer written notice of any non-compliance, and if a payment deficiency exists, then Customer shall have fifteen (15) days from the date of such notice to make payment to Red Hat for any payment deficiency. The amount of the payment deficiency will be determined by multiplying the number of underreported Installed Systems or Services by the annual fee for such item. If Customer is found to have underreported the number of Installed Systems or amount of Services by more than five percent (5%), Customer shall, in addition to the annual fee for such item, pay a penalty equal to twenty percent (20%) of the underreported fees.
>They don't just show up and kick down your door.
Yes, they do.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&q=bsa+raid&btnG=Search
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BMO
Shame you got modded troll. This is pretty insightful, though it should say "Outsource your work to a country which has lax tax laws."
One of the most unintentionally hilarious points in TFA is Steve Ballmer's comment;
Users such as the Government of the Isle of Man are already saving up to £120 per year using the beta version of Windows 7
The Isle of Man is largely an offshore tax haven with around 1,350 desktop computers for the entire government. If all of the promised "£100 per desktop per year" savings materialise, the IoM government will have saved a grand total of £135,000 by using beta software. So why would Ballmer be so interested in such a small deployment?
Accounts for Microsoft Ireland Research, an Irish subsidiary of the global software giant, show that the company paid just €460,000 in tax, on profits of more than €1.2 billion last year.
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/category/microsoft/
That's 0.04% tax.
Still wondering why Microsoft is heavily involved in an offshore tax haven?
Even funnier, the IoM Government was an early supporter of Windows Vista, and claimed savings switching to that OS. Though only completing their rollout in October 2009, they were just in time to save even more money changing to Windows 7. If they keep making savings upgrading like that, pretty soon Microsoft'll be paying them for installing Windows.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
>So I stopped after the first page, but none of those had anything to do with the OP or the subject at hand.
First link.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312948,00.html
You lose, Pumpkin.
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BMO
Getting free software to do ones bidding is really just learning how to use it and doesn't take any more time than non-free software in most cases. The thing is that there are some differences and that in schools proprietary is what is taught.
Yes it is harder for some applications but for the vast majority of office work FOSS is just as good. If you really need that little boost and can't afford to pay the time then pay the money and say hello to the auditor with a smile on your face as you agreed to the horrific contract.
If you really don't like it contact your representative in government. If your government doesn't have a representative for you that is at least elected in a reasonably fair manner well then it may be time to replace your government.
For all intensive purposes
I've always thought that that was "For all intents and purposes."
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Depends on the flavor. Try debian.
>"Software auditors" are just about unknown to users of any other platform.
Shows how little you know. Unix has had proprietary engineering software for ages and heaven help you if you've been playing fast and loose with your licenses for $10k+ a seat software.
You are forced to have the auditors by agreeing to the licenses to use certain software products.
I don't know about where you work, but where I am they dropped all new software purchases & maintenance for software they owned 12 months ago.
But they aren't planning on moving to open source. They purchased the software, they aren't hiring anyone, and so they don't need to do anything.
Long live Office 2000!
Here's a nice old story about a Microsoft software user that got audited, sued, fined and dragged through the press. Apparently they sell guitars. Of course a loss for somebody is naturally a win for somebody else.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, I don't think you understand HIPAA very well. It DOES allow for a number of disclosures without patient consent:
To law enforcement
To treating physicians and other clinicians, for public health activities, for health oversight purposes, to protect against personal and material harm
Even for marketing
And a raft of others.
This is not the bogeyman you are looking for.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Microsoft hates that mentality. Therefore, they are moving to a subscription model with Office 2010. But they've got a tough road converting the huge base of Office 2000, XP, 2003, 2007 people who have a license into infinity.
The government can't save you.
I'm posting AC because I do IT work for IOM gov. Your post is full of misinformation.
First of all it's disingenuous to represent the Isle of Man as a "tax haven". It's one of the few offshore jurisdictions that aren't on the US blacklist of tax havens and has tax information sharing agreements with anyone that matters. We don't have "lax tax laws". We're one of the only 3 jurisdictions whitelisted by the UK to conduct online gambling precisely because we have good regulation and anti-money laundering protection. And the overall level of tax burned on the IOM is about the same as the US.
Second. There are about 5000 desktop and laptop computers. Now you might not think such small numbers don't matter, but it's not the numbers, it's where they are. The IOM has everything you'd find in your average government, from the executive offices right down to sewage treatment, water utilities, power generation, hospitals, schools, roads, etc, etc. Only it's much smaller. So why does MS care? Because they can deploy their products across an entire and extremely varied organisation, and capture that in only 5000 machines.
As for the Vista/Windows 7 thing. The software is licenced through microsoft's rental scheme, so whether they stay on Windows XP or Windows 7 doesn't matter, they pay the same. The claimed savings were down to lower maintenance costs etc. Also after the deployment of Vista, the upgrade to Windows 7 (like all their application deployments) is through a system called SMS. It's deployed over the network, overnight and is completed with one reboot. No user settings are lost as they're all on network profiles.
I don't like MS as much as the next slashdotter, but you're talking about things you don't know. Stop.
Even Ballmer admits that getting rid of Windows simplifies things ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Read the links. It's what I put them there for.
According to the Irish Independent, in the past two years Microsoft’s Irish subsidiary has paid dividends totalling €5bn to its Seattle-based parent. That’s despite making profits less than that at €2bn pre tax a year.
Understand what's happening yet?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
From Wiki;
The Isle of Man does not charge corporation tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax or wealth tax. Personal income tax is levied at 10–18% on the worldwide income of Isle of Man residents, up to a maximum tax liability of £100,000. Banking income tax is levied on the profits of Isle of Man based banks at 10% and income from the rent of Isle of Man property is levied at the same rate.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Getting free software to do ones bidding is really just learning how to use it and doesn't take any more time than non-free software in most cases.
I have to disagree with that as far as desktop applications go. Although I normally hold up Firefox as a shining example of what other FOSS projects could achieve, the 'eco-system' doesn't really work for end users even with this nice browser.
For instance, I recently setup some Ubuntu systems for a shop doing heavy online sales through eBay. One day soon after, someone there decides to get a better camera but can no longer select the resulting JPEG files for uploading because the new camera does filenames in UPPERCASE. This isn't a problem with Firefox on Windows or MacOS, but on Ubuntu the upload file dialog insists on showing only files with all-lowercase extensions. This 'basic incompatibility with some cameras' ruined their Ubuntu experience and they migrated back to Windows. I could have tried a different browser, but I think Opera would have been confusing for them, and other browsers I have low confidence in dealing with the full gamut and combination of eBay / UPS / USPS / PayPal pages (which even Firefox on Windows has had some problems with until recently).
There was also the problem with being stuck with the application versions that Ubuntu gives you, regardless of what the current released versions of those apps are. And I am not going to hazard full distro upgrades every 6 months to get current apps (talk about being disruptive), nor am I going to manually upgrade those apps when they are unlikely to have undergone robust testing on the older version of Ubuntu currently being used.
Additionally, OpenOffice on the latest Ubuntu has been rather unstable and the amount of data my customers and associates have lost hasn't exactly helped my relationships with them. Not only are data lost to crashes but also to those odd crash-recovery dialogs that appear and "recover" (read: erase) your document when there was no crash in the first place. On top of that I've had to work around bizzarre document rendering bugs on some relatively simple documents (a table of numbers with one simple bar graph, for instance, getting the fill patterns wrong for some of the data sets) and then there are the semi-regular complaints that Calc is missing useful features found in Excel.
So even the best FOSS apps have rough edges that are too painful for even unsophisticated users. At the moment, the only ones I'm recommending to people are Firefox and Thunderbird. The rest are either too flawed, or are tolerable only by more sophisticated users who don't see a couple changes for added steps in workflow as a big deal.
Agreed about the ladies ;)
Let me tell you something, Argentina is far away from being heaven (Specially since Heaven doesn't existe :D ). We have a lot of problems, the same corrupt governments we've always had, and a lot of things to fix as a country. But, regardless of all that, Argentina is a beautiful land, with great potential. We just have to start doing certain things better :).
Regarding immigrating here, the constitution says "Para nosotros, nuestra posteridad, y para todos los hombres del mundo que quieran habitar el suelo Argentino"
And, from our immigration law:
DE LOS DERECHOS Y LIBERTADES DE LOS EXTRANJEROS
ARTICULO 4 - El derecho a la migración es esencial e inalienable de la persona y la República Argentina lo garantiza sobre la base de los principios de igualdad y universalidad.
You can read the whole text here:
http://www.gema.com.ar/ley25871.html
As you can see, this is no the United States. Racism is not an issue here, and everyone is welcome.
Argentina provides free health care and education of all degrees to any human being in our country, regardless of citizenship.
The only reason while you might be denied citizenship, is if you have ... "unfinished business" with the law in your country of origin.
So, if that's not the case, then welcome to Argentina ;).
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Ok Bro! Let me guess, you got caught across borders with some spicy cargo. The gov gets all worked up with that shit, and it shouldn't even be a crime.
Anyway, Good luck with it. Remember you always have a choice: You can just come here, and try it out. Nobody is going to bother you. If you can legally get out of your country, you can legally get in here. Getting citizenship will be another deal, but nobody will stop you from getting into the country, or going out. Once in here, pay your taxes, and request citizenship. Once you are inside, it's easier.
Also, given the current political instability in Colombia, you might just ask for asylum. That overrides the usual procedure.
IANAL, YMMV.
Good luck, my friend.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?