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Software Audits: How High-Tech Software Vendors Play Hardball (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Dan Tynan offers an inside look at how high-tech software vendors such as Adobe, Oracle, and IBM play hardball over software licensing, pushing customers to "true up" to the tune of billions of dollars per year -- and using the threat of audits as a sales tool to close lucrative deals. "When it comes to software audits, the code of omerta prevails," Tynan writes. "It's not a question of whether your organizations' software licenses will get audited. It's only a question of when, how often, and how painful the audits will be. The shakedown is such a sure thing that nearly every customer we contacted asked us to keep their names out of this story, lest it make their employers a target for future audits."
Four years ago I was sent some audit paperwork (Microsoft SAM) as part of a shakedown with the excuse that the business I work for bought an NT server licence and 10 CAL licences in 1998. That was the last licence purchase from MS apart from OEM licence since the place was a *nix shop and moved to SAMBA around 2000 (no point having a single MS server - should have at least a backup domain controller anyway since MS server is so fragile). So in 2012, FOURTEEN YEARS after buying licences the vultures turned up.
I took a look at it, it had dozens of pages of things unrelated to the actual licences including questions about the number of android, mac and linux devices. I decided that it was a very offensive fishing expedition and marketing exercise and that I had no desire to ever be in the situation where they could legally inflict this upon me. so I told them the licences were not current and not in use so I was not their customer - several times, and eventually they stopped contacting me.
It was a whole lot more than just sending them details of current licences (of which I had none) and clearly was designed as a combination of shakedown and very intrusive marketing information aquisition.
So it's not just about satisfying them that you have current licences, they want to know about what else you have from other vendors, number of employees, company income etc which is none of their business.