Sure. But that changes the case, doesn't it? In one instance, we have an employer who is aware that they are breaking the law and doesn't care while in the other instance, we have the single employee who should know better keeping his employer in the dark. Without an actual court case, we don't really know. That's why I'm troubled by the BSA's tactics which seem crafted to keep things out of court which means that the innocent get sweeped in with the guilty.
I notified the last company that I worked for about some licensing violations. They said that they'd look into it but, after a few months, they didn't do squat.
Oh, sure. I've seen that happen, too. And employees don't say anything because they'd be hurting their employer -- their bread and butter. I'm not claiming their isn't a problem. I'm claiming that I don't like the BSA's approach.
By the way, not having to push employers to buy licenses is one of the main reasons why I specified Linux for my most recent projects. I can create as many development or deployment servers as I want (OS, database, web server, application server) without having to worry about justifying, purchasing, or tracking licenses. As an added benefit, the platform independent nature of the software I'm using (along with the absence of license fees) has allowed me to deploy the project to a Windows laptop for network-free demos and to a Windows web server that was already in our DMZ.
Obviously, they were granted a court order to search. And in order to get a court order, they had to present probable cause. Again, you lose. There was evidence here. Judges don't just hand out court orders.
Have you read the details of the Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service? Judges and federal authorities make mistakes. They may very well have had probable but it would be based on the testimony of the ex-employee. That means that this all still comes down to what that ex-employee and employer knew and when and whether the claims of a single disgruntled ex-employee should be sufficient for such action. In the case of a guilty employer, this may seem warranted but what if the employer isn't guilty or made an honest mistake? Rare? Possibly. But our justice system errs on the side of protecting the innocent for a reason.
I'm not bothered by the BSA asking Ball to check his licenses and pay up. I'm bothered by the drastic measure of using a raid and the fact that Ball didn't get a day in court to defend himself because he felt he couldn't afford it and I think it should bother you that the heavy hand of the BSA turned Ball into a poster boy for open source software. Had the BSA handled this differently, Ball would not be using open source software. That's not a loss for the open source community. That's a loss for Microsoft and other commercial software vendors.