Wednesday, July 04, 2007

 

Business Software Alliance Announces $1 Million Rewards for Piracy Whistleblowers - Dire Implications for Businesses

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The Business Software Alliance (BSA), an industry group comprised of Microsoft, Adobe and others, announced that, for a limited time, they are awarding up to one million dollars to employees who rat out their employers for pirating software.


The award ceiling is raised until October, when it is scheduled to expire.


As a business owner, does this seem like it might affect you? "Not I," you protest, "My business does not pirate software." I'm sure that's true, but if a disgruntled employee reports you to the BSA for big bucks, did you know that the onus will be entirely yours to prove that each and every copy of each and every program and operating system is legit? Hope you kept extensive documentation, receipts and license stickers for all that stuff.


The number of "false positives" will undoubtedly be high, especially as the reward amounts increase. So you'll be at risk no matter whether you are pirating or not. The BSA will be after you for some type of settlement, even if only your record-keeping, not your ethics, is to blame. As a business owner, I believe there is a far better choice, a decision that you need to make right now.

Choose open source software.

And there will be no whining about how there is no vendor to support you. I've had exponentially better treatment posting an issue on an open source bulletin board and getting help from the community of developers than I've ever had calling a large corporation like Microsoft to get a bug resolved.

And now, there is a legitimate open source choice for almost every category of software your company needs.
For the categories where you can't find a suitable open source candidate, you can also choose from the wide range of SaaS (software as a service) products available, many of them free. The free Saas products, of course, will not give you problems with the BSA, and the paid SaaS products won't either, because it is very cut-and-dried as to how many people are using the "service" - the vendor always has exact records on your company's usage. It is very difficult to cheat, and you certainly can't cheat without knowing it (unlike with shrinkwrapped software).

My favorite SaaS products are:
There are literally hundreds more, and you can even search a list of them using SimpleSpark.
Whether you choose open source or SaaS, no Business Software Alliance alleging that you stole their software. (Just imagine the expense of the audit, nevermind the expense of documenting your compliance with each and every license.)

No licensing costs at all. And, if the software doesn't do quite what you want (especially in the case of ERP, CRM), change it! Go look at the source code, make the changes to fit your business. Put it in a separate module so you can easily upgrade the next time the open source community issues an upgrade (also free).

What are you waiting for?



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