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Kaspersky Quits BSA Over SOPA Support
First time accepted submitter Cmdrm writes with an article about Kaspersky Lab quitting the BSA over their (now lukewarm) support of SOPA. From the press release: "Kaspersky Lab would like to clarify that the company did not participate in the elaboration or discussion of the SOPA initiative and does not support it. Moreover, the company believes that the SOPA initiative might actually be counter-productive for the public interest, and decided to discontinue its membership in the BSA as of January 1, 2012.'"
Might translation: we fear that SOPA might actually hit our bottom line.
Kaspersky Lab makes big $$$ over "checking" the pirated/counterfeit content to be virus free, so hardly any surprise here.
Every small business I know that has survived a BSA audit has switched to OSS. I made a hefty salary doing that over the past 10 years helping small business do just that.
Changing out the backend to OSS is the most painless for them. switching to OSS apps under windows get them a taste. IT'w when you set up a single machine with linux and show them it works (and you have more control so elf bowling cant get installed, yes I know you can do this under windows) is when they go "oh really!" and jump on that bandwagon.
Some apps they cant walk away from windows, but their liability is significantly reduced by fixing the mess that Microsoft has with their server licensing. Most businesses are out of compliance with their server licenses, and that is where the BSA typically nails them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
THIS! We were mainly OSS to begin with and that saved us, and we actually had all the boxes and receipts for everything else. But in the end after the BSA dropped their case we wiped everything and now every corporate machine is 100% OSS. I honestly hope they come after us again so we can just laugh at them. Fuckers.