Last Wednesday, we have been checked by 1 BSA lawyer, 3 cops, 1 expert and 3 company representative for unlicensed use of software products (piracy) in the company. Result? We don’t have the requirements to use pirated copies of software.

BSA is an alliance, that has no power at all, yet can come to your office and detect if you have any unlicensed office. The idea is simple, create fear, so they will become so afraid of you that they won’t tend to piracy.
But for our case it was different. Somebody had informed them that we were using pirated copies of Photoshop. So they have taken representatives from Adobe, from the local police force and taken a search permission and raided our office.
If you are not familiar with the company I work for, Kartaca, let me explain it a little bit. Kartaca is a company specialized in web software and mobile infrastructure. It uses open source and free software to provide services to its customers. Everyone uses Ubuntu as OS in the office (except some fanboys like me :), LibreOffice (iWork!) to write word documents, Firefox to surf the web (yeah, Opera, again an exception), Eclipse for development (Textmate, I have a license of course…) and goes on and on.
After this brief, BSA’a expert inspected 40 Ubuntu computers in 5 minutes, inspected our server (they don’t even have an X) 5 minutes. Checked the only Windows machine in 10 minutes and only found a 2002 release of Photohop 7 which we sometimes use to cut PSD files when Gimp creates an error.
After 20 minute inpection, reporting these took 30 minutes. Report said: “They don’t even have Windows to use pirated copies of Adobe products”.
I was always proud about my company by saying: “We only have a single Windows machine to test on Internet Explorer 6″. Seems like this saying is now offical by reports! Hell Yeah!
While I don’t like how BSA is doing things, it really seems necessary in my country, as software is often regarded a very simple task. People don’t really know the cost of the software so they tend to weight it regarding to the physical products, the media which you transport the actual content.
Somebody has given a tip about us to BSA that they are using pirated software. That’s really something because we are well known in the industry as being an open source and free software user and supporter. I’m a bit angry about the event, because we are paying money for licenses! We have nearly bought the complete Atlassian package, we bought JRebel, we bought Balsamiq, etc. We are paying and supporting, dammit! Perhaps the informant had a grudge for us, I don’t know. At least tell them about a cross platform product so at least they might be able to check something!
Well, to wrap’em all, they came, checked and found no pirated software, not even the requirements to run their licensed software. If this was a proper inspection, they would have asked us about our Jira licenses etc. Well anyway, it’s done.

Kingdom of Roi: http://roysimkes.net/blog/2011/09/unlicensed-software-raid-at-the-office/