Connected Software Development

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.

• Operating System ----- Ubuntu
• Office Suite ----- OpenOffice.org
• Browser ----- Firefox
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software ----- Compiere
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software ----- SugarCRM
• Personal Information Manager (PIM) ----- Nomad
• photo image manipulation software ----- GIMP
• e-mail client software ----- Thunderbird

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:

• To Do List manager ----- Remember the Milk
• RSS reader ----- Google Reader
• Collaborative office suite ----- Google Docs and Spreadsheets

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?

Labels: BSA, Business Software Alliance, Compiere, Firefox, GIMP, Nomad, open source, OpenOffice.org, software as a service, SugarCRM, Ubuntu

SimpleSpark is a search engine for online services and tools. It includes "software as a service" Websites like Yahoo Calendar, CafePress (imprinted merchandise), Remember the Milk (task manager) --- you name it! It is tremendously easy to use.

Try it! Type in "spreadsheet" and you'll get the normal choices of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Zoho Office and ThinkFree, but you also get another eleven other choices! That's a lot of spreadsheet choice.

I'm pretty impressed. I think the downside I noticed is that it seems to be based on the developers adding their own Web services to the list. So if a site hasn't heard about SimpleSpark, they won't be there automatically. For instance, probably the best online personal training Website HyperStrike, isn't on the list for Health. Plus, the tagging structure is a bit messed up. When I search for "social networking" I cannot find the holistic networking site Zaadz, but when I type "social networks" it is there. That's confusing!

Let me know what you think of it. It's so nice to have so many choices in one place. If anything, SimpleSpark seems to cater to the smallest of the dotcoms here, which is nice. It's pretty easy to find the big guys, but in most searches I've done here, I don't recognize 90% of the choices, which means it's always a learning experience. Now I don't have to wade through thousands of TechCrunch postings to find that cool new service that I heard about once from somebody.

Oh, did I mention? Everything has RSS feeds. I mean everything. Every search list, a "newest" list on every category. Damn, I love that.

Labels: SimpleSpark, software as a service, Web services