St. Charles County Technology Committee

In case you are unaware, Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk, and several other companies, are very serious about making sure that you actually purchase licenses for all of the software that you are running in your business. You may have heard of the Business Software Alliance (BSA); it is the company which runs around collecting fees for "unlicensed" software. What you may not know is that BSA targets small businesses, not just "the big guys," and that it actually pays informers, offering up to $1M.

Software Piracy Fight Makes Enemies gives a pretty good description of the BSA and its tactics and is well worth the read, especially if you use software by companies such as Microsoft and Adobe and AutoDesk. Here are a few particularly frightening quotes:

Michael Gaertner worried he could lose his company. A group called the Business Software Alliance had written him to claim that his 10-person architectural firm in Galveston, Texas, was using unlicensed software.

The letter demanded $67,000 - most of one year's profit - or else the BSA would seek more in court....

In Gaertner's case, some employees had been unable to open files with the firm's drafting software, so they worked around it by installing programs they found on their own, breaking company rules, he said. And receipts for legitimate software had been lost in the hubbub of running his company.

This paragraph emphasizes the need to keep receipts for all software:

BSA audits zing companies for software that came with used computers they bought to save money. The BSA considers software pirated if a company can't produce a receipt for it, no matter how long ago it was purchased. Software boxes or certificates of authenticity are no help, because the BSA argues the software could have been obtained from an illegitimate source.

Open source software such as Linux and OpenOffice.org certainly offer viable alternatives in many instances.

In one case, a BSA raid on musical-instrument maker Ernie Ball Inc. cost the company $90,000 in a settlement. Soon after, Microsoft sent other businesses in his region a flyer offering discounts on software licenses, along with a reminder not to wind up like Ernie Ball.

Enraged, CEO Sterling Ball vowed never to use Microsoft software again, even if "we have to buy 10,000 abacuses." He shifted to open-source software, which lacks such legal entanglements because its underlying code is freely distributed.

Here at Hen's Teeth Network, we use a mixture of licensed and open source software. In cases where licensed software is truly better than the free stuff, we use licensed software and we then pick up the burden of being scrupulous in managing and tracking it. But if we can get free software which does the job at hand, we use the free stuff. It saves us cash and administrative headaches.