We thought about writing and distributing (for free of course) an
application that, upon a press of the BSA button, CAREFULLY deletes all
unlicensed software.  It would decide what to remove by info polled from
a config file that the user would have to construct.  The machine would
then reboots to Linux.  

I am not a proponent of pirating SW, however, I also believe that most
companies who sell a good software package (and lots that don't (M$))
get paid plenty of times for it and each person needs to make their own
ethical decisions on what they "buy".  That decision should be made
without the BS(A) prodding them in the keyster too.  Besides, there are
plenty of ways for companies to key software so it can't be pirated if
they would make the effort.

Back to the point: I think that would be funny to see those bozos walk
in and see a bunch of machines rebooting with nothing but Linux and
legal software when it reboots.  Thoughts?

Carl Mayer
RBC Incorporated
http://www.revbiz.com
mailto:cmayer@revbiz.com
913-385-5700x333 Fax 913-385-5701 

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Hutchins [mailto:hutchins@opus1.com]
Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2001 10:25 PM
To: tony@hammitt.com
Cc: Jonathan Hutchins; kclug@kclug.org
Subject: Re: Paranoia

On 13 Jul 2001 14:57:22 -0500, Tony Hammitt wrote:

> One thing that companies should do if they are afraid of M$'s license
police
> is to repartition their hard drives and install Linux.  When the M$
weenies
> come around, boot to Linux and tell them to f*ck off.  Then boot back
if you
> want to.  They have no right to examine your hard drive's contents,
just
> outward appearances of the system.

Oh come now, has anyone actually SEEN an "MS License Policeman"?

The closest I've seen is a corporate policy to do an audit via either
Network Auto-Discovery or physical inventory.  And if Company Policy is
that you don't run anything but NT, you just count every box that's
plugged in as one license (better have a list of off-site laptops too).

Basically that's the kind of documentation that's going to get audited
if anyone official asks about it.  Nobody is going to put up with an MS
employee going around examining machines.  I really have to question the
reality behind such an imagined scenario anyway - why would they?

This is why so often the unlicensed copies are on "unofficial" systems,
mock-ups, test systems, prototypes, etc.  We rationalise that they're
merely representative of machines that will eventually have legitimate
licenses, but technically they're "illegal".

The problem is that MS is starting to plant code that has to call home
to activate the license, and until someone hacks that system it's going
to be a pain to run these "unoficial" unlicensed systems. This means
that there won't be as much testing and development, because we won't
have the budget for full licenses for servers that aren't "production",
and things will run worse.  (MS is screwing up in this, one more bit of
evidence that the company is getting farther away from it's technical
roots and more and more into the control of Marketing and Legal.)