Cheaper was believed to be better than the right thing.This tiny Texas software company couldn’t ever challenge them in court and win (for posterity: we could, and we did). Negotiations occurred to try and come to closure about the piracy, but when it came down to paying the bill for the software that had been used/was being used, a higher up vetoed the payment due to us. In our case, an underling at the retail company had told us they were pirating our software, and he wanted to rectify it. But unfortunately having been at a small ISV who wound up suing a much larger retail company because they were pirating our software, “doing the right thing” in business sometimes comes down to “doing the cheap, quick, or lazy thing”. One commented, “I never understand why doing it right & not getting sued for doing it wrong aren’t a strong argument.”
Two friends on Twitter had a dialog the other day about responsibility/culpability when open source components are included in an application/system. But it is because of this complexity that these systems must be planned, documented, and clearly understood at some level, or we’re kidding ourselves that we can secure, protect, defend (and properly pay for) these systems, and have them be available with any kind of reliability. The reality is that complex systems are complex. But what about the technology, when issues like Heartbleed come along and expose fundamental flaws across the Internet?
How can there possibly be? But the problem is if you want to license effectively (or build systems that are secure, compliant, or reliable), an individual or group of individuals must understand the entire integrated application stack – or face the reality that there will be holes. In the case of software licensing, we’ve generally found that there is no one single person that knows the breadth of a typical organization’s infrastructure. It takes planning, auditing, understanding the entire system, understanding an application lifecycle, and hiring competent developers and testers to help build and verify everything. Instead, most come (often repeatedly, sometimes with more people each time) to simply understand the ever-changing rules, how to apply them correctly, and how to (as I often hear it said) “do the right thing”.ĭoing the right thing, whether we’re talking licensing, security, compliance, and beyond, often isn’t cheap. About every two months, a colleague and I travel to various cities in the US (and sometimes abroad) to teach Microsoft customers how to license their software effectively over a rather intense two-day course.Īlmost none of these attendees want to game the system.
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