The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a trade group that helps enforce copyrights and licenses for big software companies. They decided to make an example of the company Ernie Ball, a maker of guitar strings. They found that of all the software on their 72 desktop systems, about 8% was being used without a proper license. Most of it Microsoft products.
Rather than request that the company pay up their licenses and change their processes so they wouldn't drift out of compliance again, BSA took them to court where they finally settled for $100,000.
In response to this extremely bad treatment, Ernie Ball's CEO told his IT people to end their use of Microsoft software within a year. They did it with open source software and are going strong three years later.
Great interview (with a FUD flash ad from Microsoft on the same page)
(via Absolute Piffle (who doesn't do permalinks))
Posted by jeffy at October 21, 2003 01:41 PM