An article featured in a South Africa technology portal popped up in one of my feeds today, and I couldn’t help but take the bait. The column, entitled “Open Source Against Piracy,” contends that open source software developers should consider becoming members of the BSA.  As I best understand it, the reasons given are twofold:  

1. The BSA perpetuates a belief that anyone who copies or gives away software is a pirate; open source developers, as BSA members, could persuade the organization to change its definition of piracy and ensure the terms of FOSS agreements are being upheld.
2. Users pirate software not because they are “criminals” but because the software they wish to use is cost-prohibitive; if producers of open source software can convince the BSA to be more aggressive in their pursuit of software pirates, illegal users will flock to free open source alternatives.

Frankly, I find these arguments rather curious and a bit thin on logic.  First, the goal of persuading the BSA to conduct audits and enforce open source license agreements would be nothing short of futile, given the relative permissiveness of open source EULAs, the characteristic lack of paper trail, the absence of financial motivation, and the difficulty determining where, when, and by whom violations have occurred. How would the BSA even begin compiling its list of targets?  It’s not that the BSA doesn’t understand the fundamental difference between commercial and open source EULAs, as the author claims—it’s simply that the entity isn’t set up or, perhaps more importantly, intended to enforce the latter. 

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Ouch!  A New York-based brokerage company, Euro Brokers, is being sued by IBM for an undisclosed amount for allegedly downloading unlicensed software valued at more than $1.7 million.  According to an InformationWeek article, Euro Brokers was once a legitimate IBM customer, having purchased licenses for Informix database software. But a software audit performed by KPMG revealed that over the course of several years the company had installed additional copies that it hadn’t paid for. 

Here’s the chronology of events as described by IBM in the lawsuit: (more…)

[Warning: Those who know me know that I’m somewhat prone to hyperbole; this post is no exception.]

I woke up this morning feeling something like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.” On NPR: yet more bad economic news from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Despite forecasts predicting a December turnaround in the employment market, the economy actually shed another 85,000 jobs. Seriously? Again?

You may recall in the economic downturn of 2001, George Bush famously pleaded for consumers to “go shopping” as a patriotic duty that would help lift the nation out of recession. Well, if, like me, you’re not inclined to go spend your recently decimated nest egg, given the tepid “jobless recovery” that seems to be underway.  But maybe you’re more inclined to spend a little of your company’s money as a patriotic act of economic stimulus known as “software license management.”

Still with me?  If so, hear me out:

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A follow-on to last Friday’s post about the BSA’s recent worldwide study linking software piracy rates with the proliferation of PC malware:

Jeff Williams, principle group program manager for Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center, announced that Microsoft has come out with a report revealing that malware infection rates are directly correlated with the reluctance of those running counterfeit copies of Windows to use Windows Update, the service that pushes OS patches out to PCs.  (Microsoft’s research on malware infection rates was also used to draw similar conclusions in the BSA’s own study.) 

But according to Gregg Keizer of Computer World, Microsoft’s numbers don’t add up.  Here are a couple of excerpts from a column he published on Monday. 

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I just stumbled upon a rather frightful Business Software Alliance (BSA) report revealing the relationship between software piracy and internet security. The report concludes that the higher a country’s piracy rate, the higher their malware infection rates. (Read the entire report here.)

 The BSA offers two primary reasons for this phenomenon:

•  Individuals running software that was illegally obtained often don’t have access to critical vendor-issued security patches that prevent malware from infiltrating their PCs. (I’d also guess that in geographic regions with high piracy rates, consumers are generally less likely to spend money on tools (or professionals) designed to protect and/or repair their PCs should an infection occur.)
• Often times, sites distributing pirated software and/or piracy tools actually embed malware into their downloaded products or employ other means to make visitors’ computers vulnerable to infection.

While the BSA focuses its efforts on trying to cut off the distribution of pirated software at the source (through the legal process, as well as through a practice called “takedowns”), this approach is—in my estimation—equivalent to chasing apparitions; as known channels are shut down, new channels simply open up. Rather, the BSA needs to find a way to educate consumers, primarily in developing countries where incomes are low and piracy is high, about the ways in which indirect costs of using pirated software often exceed the savings. While the BSA dedicates considerable resources to education, it appears to me that the bulk of their efforts target businesses, where piracy tends to be more the result of careless licensing practices than internet piracy—and the security issues are therefore much less of a concern.

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