How many mortgage companies?
Those fines have to hurt, particularly with the market the mortgage firms have to deal with at the minute!
Six firms cough for unlicensed software
Three US financial services firms have paid large fines for using unlicensed software in their offices. IBG LLC of Chicago, Illinois was caught with dodgy copies of Symantec and Microsoft software and agreed to pay $175,000. American Mortgage Consultants, Inc., based in Liberty, Illinois, paid $136,750 to settle claims that it …
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 12:13 GMT Gerrit Hoekstra
Too much work to manage licenses
There does not appear to be any recognition by the likes of the BSA and the FSA of the amount of effort required to manage the licensing of software in enterprises - this effort alone adds significantly to the TCO of software.
The complexity of licenses often requires legal council, adding further to the cost and deployment delays. This is furthermore not helped by licensing terms that change from one version to the next for what would otherwise have been a perfectly natural software upgrade for an enterprise. Adding to the licensing woes, vendors impose a plethora of disparate licensing platforms that require entire servers dedicated to managing licenses (which in turn require further licenses;-).
So you see, it is easy to get this wrong.
Of course, had these poor sods known that there are equally functional, free, at least as robust and secure, software packages that could have served their needs, then the BSA and the FSA would now be scouring the job pages.
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 13:00 GMT stalker
@anonymous coward
"Why are all these firms using Symantec? No wonder they're technically incompetent."
To be fair, we use Symantec on each of the LAN's i manage (currently four, plus our own) and its always been good to use. Symantec Corp Ed 10.x has been a really good AV system, as long as its configured properly, and the service and support from them have always impressed me....in fact, I would go so far as to say its one of the few areas of my management I have to worry about the least.
It hasn't caused any issues in and of itself, never brought any of my boxes down, and its done its job with the minimum of fuss. My systems are virus- and malware-free, resource usage is at a minimum, and overall TCO is fair enough for what we get, in both monetary value and man hours.
Technically incompetent? or just using misconfigured software? you decide!
</rant>
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 13:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Gerrit Hoekstra
While managing licenses is a pain in th arse, these companies must have been either utterly incompetent or deliberately using unlicensed software. I have worked for a firm that was audited by the British equivalent of the BSA, (although we never found out why we were targeted). It turns out that we had a few more computers running MS Office than we had licenses for, and were given a grace period to buy them. So, apart from the inconvenience of chaperoning the auditors, the cost was a few licenses - no fine. I understand that the BSA works in the same way, so for these firms to have been fined means they must have been using enormous amounts of unlicensed software.
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 13:35 GMT Stan
Great news...
for open source. Companies using unlicenced software is almost on the same scale as p2p but attracts nothing like the same amount of attention.
Cases like this at the very least cause folks making the decisions to think twice before sticking a single user piece of software on every machine in the building. At some stage the question "what about this open source stuff..." will come up, especially when the question "why do we have to buy windows 40 times?" is asked.
When companies have secure and stable platforms for practically nothing then the cost of specialised commercial software to do the jobs that need doing doesn't sting so much and the licenses involved will be better respected.
Well, in the perfect world it would work that way.... :)
cheers
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 14:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ Stalker
Symantec A/V was good untill they went and released Endpoint. We've got to the point now where we've had to disable features of the new A/V to keep it working on our network.
Network threat protection ends up killing the internet and mapped drives and there are no solid solutions to this problem instead we got told my Symantec themselves to disable it as the bugs were still being ironed out (beta release in a retail product?!).
It's also got a nack of reperforming scheduled scans twice, has several user interface bugs such as when deploying clients it consistantly prompts for admin user name and password (not fun when your deploying it to 80+ clients). Symantec again are aware of the issue but have yet to issue a fix.
Yes symantec's Enterprise support is actually good it's just a shame there products aren't (baring Backup Exec which let's face it they didn't make, Veritas did).
After experiencing all this were switching to a new A/V system when the maintenance on this one runs out.
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 16:35 GMT corestore
For frell's sake...
Please *don't* call it a fine! It's damages. Compensation. A fine is something imposed by a criminal court, and if you don't pay it you go to jail. This is an out-of-court settlement for civil damages, not a bloody fine. I hate it when pipsqueak bodies like the BSA start trumpeting lies about their ability to 'fine' people!
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 20:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Well
Considering some of the mentioned companies dictate that EVEN IF you have paid for a license, if you didn't get it from an approved source (and that means approved for WHERE YOU ARE USING IT, even if they are approved suppliers where you BOUGHT IT), it's considered unlicensed.. I don't think it's as straight and plain as the article says.
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Wednesday 9th January 2008 22:39 GMT Christopher E. Stith
attention to detail?
It's nice to know the BSA thinks it's easy to keep track of every last license. This is especially true since they can't tell the difference in their report between Libertyville, Illinois and Liberty, Illinois.
Libertyville is a Chicago suburb of 22,000 people in Lake County which is the Northeast corner of the state alongside Lake Michigan. That's where American Mortgage Consultants is based.
Liberty is a suburb of Quincy, Illinois of about 520 people which is in Adams County. Adams County is in the West-central portion of the state between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
