What drives software piracy whistle-blowers?
According to an interesting article on Computerworld, revenge isn’t the number one driver for those that blow the whistle on organizations that use unlicensed software. Rather than wanting to get back at employers who have perhaps mis-treated them or made them redundant, it seems the main motivation of whistle-blowers is a sense that using unlicensed software is “just not right”.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) in the US claims that it received 2,500 tip-offs in 2008, which led to it handing out $136,000 to 42 informants (the average reward being around $3,200, to save you the math). But according to the BSA, most informants are not actually interested in the money, hence the discrepency between the number of tip-offs and the actual volume of awards.
The story highlights the case of “Chuck”, a computer science teacher whose School District bought a single copy of an Adobe application for use on 1,500 desktops. After talking with IT colleagues, and even buying his own copy of the software so he could read the license agreement in full, he decided that the School District was engaged in blatant misuse of the software and made an approach to the BSA.
