Ernie Ball - Model For Open-Source Transition? 869
fr0z writes "
Ernie Ball is a company that makes guitar strings. After being raided by the BSA in 2000 without warning and fined $100,000 for a few unlicensed copies of software, CEO Sterling Ball vowed not to give another cent to Microsoft and within 6 months, according to CNET News, had the whole company switched to Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and other free software."
I'd feel bad for them... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:well he couldv'e seen it coming (Score:5, Informative)
Did you actually read the whole article? His version of the facts is that the BSA complained (among other things, maybe) about unused software that had not been properly deleted from some hard drives when after moving a PC from a department to another. In total, he had something like 8 percent of non-licensed software. And anyway, he said that his main problem was not the about paying for the software, but in the way the BSA raided his company.
Bass strings too! (Score:2, Informative)
Ernie Ball Extra Slinkies are great for playing slap bass / funk in general, very "twangie" sound.
Nice, but only good on new hardware. (Score:1, Informative)
Our company runs Microsoft office 2000 on our 300 gentoo workstations that have 128 Mb. We can't afford the $150,000 to upgrade the RAM (and the hard drives) so we can use OpenOffice (and then face the horrible fonts it uses as it uses its own propeitry font handling system)
My company outsources about 15% of its programming work to taiwan and the poor support for the Chinese character set means we have to run the Chinese version of Microsoft Office on a dedicated windows 98 box to read the documents from the taiwanese office. (no, crossover office dosen't work on non english versions of Microsoft Office).
So to summurize, for our company to be to completey Linuxized, we need a unbloated version of openoffice that can work with >128 Mb of ram and a version of crossover office that supports the Chinese edition of microsoft office.
Re:That's sweet but... (Score:4, Informative)
old, old, OLD story (Score:1, Informative)
http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/1
November 27, 2002
http://linux.bryanconsulting.com/stories/storyRea
10 June 2003
1 May 2002
etc. etc.
A little research please, editors
Re:That's sweet but... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:BSA? (Score:3, Informative)
RTFA. Conducting armed raids with the assistance of federal mercenaries^Wmarshals is SOP for the BSA.
Re:Oh, the irony of it.... (Score:2, Informative)
Is that why the last three versions of the Word, PowerPoint, and Excel formats haven't changed? Previous versions can open newer doc formats, so long as basic document features were used? Several *nix projects change their config file format more often than MS changes office formats.
Re:well he couldv'e seen it coming (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Amen! (Score:5, Informative)
just from my perspective working in a viusalFX studio...all the real technical apps. are moving over to Linux. Check out CinePaint, it is a much better "paint" type program photoshop supporting high bit depths etc. Shake, Maya, XSI they all run on Linux (better on linux infact). While I do agree with you somewhat i think alot of the more common desktop design apps are going to be taken care of ala WINE. it seems that Linux is really starting to creep into the design/FX community pretty quickly.
He didn't do enough research... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:little clarification (Score:4, Informative)
At my last job, I did corporate information security for several years for a large ISP.
We had specific policy regarding everything to do with software and just about everyone infringed at some point.
For example, Playing games at work == termination. At any given time, I could dump an interface on a firewall at any of our offices and see Quake3 or Counter-strike games being played. The people who 'could not be behind the proxy or nat due to their job function' would often try and set up game servers.
This sort of thing seems to be rampant in technical businesses. A large percentage of technical types feel that they are smart, the exception, or somehow immune to company policy. Combine this with a slacker attitude and you have some problems. What they don't understand, there is a whole world of people playing catchup to the American technical market. Soon enough, they'll have all our jobs. My last position was eliminated when they announced 3000 of our call center employees and three offices were shutting down due to their spiffy new contract with a support company in India.
Anyway, back to the software licence issues. For organizations like the BSA, any sizable office is an easy target, as unless the IT group comes across as 'network nazis', software policy will be ignored by most.
I once worked at a smaller firm who would make employees pay out of pocket for any licence infractions they caused. One guy got stuck with the option of finding a new job or pay for the company's costs surrounding an unlicenced suite of Adobe products. I think it cost him around $3k. He paid it, then got canned a few months later for going on a week-long coke binge. He forgot to schedule some vacation time for it.
Re:old, old, OLD story (Score:5, Informative)
My job includes software auditing... (Score:2, Informative)
Reality is that no matter how hard you audit your machines, how anal you are, there's always going to be something (at least one program) out there that sneaks through and isn't licensed right. Usually, the unlicensed stuff gets on the network in one of a couple ways...
1) Somebody brought it in from home for business.
2) Somebody brought it in from home for fun.
3) Somebody downloaded it.
4) We just missed one.
(Unfortunately, we use WinBlows so 1-3 are problems for us.)
While I certainly agree that commercial software must be paid for, the penalty for a mistake should be proportional... Not a "revenue shot in the arm" for the vendor if you make a simple accounting mistake.
Now, certainly, systematic copying should be punished, sure. But the Ernie Ball corporation was NOT an example of this. A vast majority of their software was legally purchased, but they paid a $100,000 fine anyway. The fine is beyond disproportionate to the point of absurdity in comparison to their offense.
I think Stuart Ball's decision to change his company to RH and stick it up Microsoft's ass was the absolute right one. Microsoft doesn't have a god-given right to $600,000 per year from my company, nor any company, and the attitude of "$100,000 fine for ALL licensing mistakes!" is just flat out extortion.
(And before you flame me that I need to go to a different back office solution so I can secure my desktops: I KNOW. But I don't have the authority to force it through.)
$100,000? Bah! Everybody should do what Stuart Ball did in a show of empathetic outrage. Do you realize we spend around $200,000 per year in employees (after adding in insurance, taxes, etc) JUST TO COMPLY WITH OUR COMMERCIAL SOFTWARE LICENSES? That's three full-time employees. Not to mention the SUPER expensive software system that costs (ballpark) another $8k per year in "maintenance fees" to keep it all straight.
Posted anonymously because I talk about details. Sorry.
Re:Oh, the irony of it.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh, the irony of it.... (Score:3, Informative)
When did an Open Source Office Productivity package come out that produces config files as its SaveAs format? I'm not aware of one. I produce documents that are meant to be printed, and viewed by other people, I don't use it to write "config files".
As you no-doubt already know, the format of an Office Productivity config file means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to an end user who will likely never be editing them. Who cares if the application is updated and the updates require different configuration options or config file formats.
You're comparing Apples to Orangutans here. Stay on topic.
Re:Oh, the irony of it.... (Score:2, Informative)
Using subsequent M$ Word versions as an example: You can use Word2k features in a document, save it as .doc and then open it in e.g. Word97. The document opens and you get all the formatting EXCEPT for the Word2k-introduced features. That means, the text will look OK, but the 'animated text' effect won't be there. (Pretty similar to HTML parsers ignoring unknown markup, I think...)
It gets ugly, however, with complex formatting like tables with funnily merged cells or complex paragraph numering schemes - older versions are then likely to render the document unreadable.
Technical details of formatting used e.g. in pre-DTP text processing are yet another matter. For example, subsequent Word versions do not encode font colors in the same fashion - there was a transition from color names to RGB somewhere. The result: the colors read from the document may slightly vary from one Word version to another.
My overall opinion: this backward-compatibility works well for simple cases. If you use M$ Office for anything more sophisticated, you must have several versions installed side-by-side.
Re:More raids please (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. They didn't pirate software. They (apparently) didn't even use the violating software instances. It was older machines given to new people without properly wiping the harddrive. That's the problem with many software licensing systems, you can suddenly be in violation without knowing it. Perhaps these problems would go away if we all switched to a software ownership model, like just about all other products people buy, instead of a licensing model.
You Sir are Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Great! (Score:2, Informative)
I wish to see more companys switching to Linux so I can justify purchasing even more of their products.
Some would be:
- McDonalds
- Toysrus
- Marlboro
- Becks
Re:Oh, the irony of it.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh, the irony of it.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More raids please (Score:3, Informative)
As for Office, I guess you can uninstall portions, but you're still paying for them. Microsoft only unbundles in extreme circumstances [newsfactor.com], like when they think people have other options:
So no, MS is not a very good choice for customization.best bass strings available (Score:3, Informative)
I used Rotosound for mnany years then switched to Ernie Ball about 12 years ago. I like a real bright tone so I change them often. I go through lots of sets of 4 and 5 string regular slinky bass. I've never had a bad string from Ernie Ball. I can't say the same of Rotosound, GHS or D'Addario. Reading a story like this only strenghtens my loyalty.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh come on (Score:3, Informative)
Usually, it's because the larger companies purchase site licenses instead of individual copies. Site licenses (for most products) cost too much for small companies, but are more cost effective on a per seat basis.
At least that was the case until I heard that the licenses cannot be transferred as an asset during a merger or acquisition (have to re-license).
As a result, site licenses may not be such a good idea in the current economy.
Ahem.. (Score:2, Informative)
From the article:In 2000, the Business Software Alliance conducted a raid and subsequent audit at the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs
There's a diffrence between a 'few' and a 'few dozen'. One is about 12 times as much, in fact...
Re:More raids please (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe citrix but not terminal server. I know lots of sysadmins that have tried terminal server and they all abandoned it eventually. One IT manager told me "I am in terminal server a good part of my day and when I get off I am so happy". Terminal servers can't really support more then ten or so clients at a time and the client software plays weird tricks with modal windows and dialog boxes.
"Side note: he'd still be dealing with MS, which I understand is his prime motivation."
It seems like it was his primary motivation.
"For example, if there is a server failure - hardware or software - everyone (or whoever is running terminal sessions from that box) is down."
These days almost everybody is on a LAN. If the fileserver or the database server is down then everybody grinds to a halt anyway. You don't incur any additional risk by putting them on thin clients. It's also easy enough to have load balancing and failover set for the servers.
"For example, a minor mistake in admining that server will reverberate throughout the entire office. "
See above. If the DBA has to bring down the database server then everybody has to stop unless of course there is failover.
"'For example, maintenance cannot easily be done incrementally throughout the day, but rather, must now be done off hours lest it affect the entire office."
Most people I know have a development server. They do all the development server and then roll out the changes to the production machine. Depending on your application you can usually do this live with Unix. In Unix there are no file lock problems and you also have some very powerfull tools like rsync/rdist that allow you to roll out changes with ease. Just to give you an example I once did a make world, make kernel on a freebsd machine while people were logged in and using it. That night I brought the machine down to single user and did an install world and install kernel and brought the machine back up. The make world took a long time but it did not stop the users, the install world took about five minutes so it was not a big deal.
"There are good and bad sides to thin-client computing. He gave only the good ones. Just an FYI."
Unix was designed from the ground up to be a thin client environment while thin client computing is a kludge on top of windows. You really can't compare the two because they are vastly different.
Re:Oh come on (Score:3, Informative)
Because they're members! [bsa.org] (Well, HP and IBM, at least.)
International considerations... (Score:3, Informative)
As an international school, we never know what version of MS Office a student might have, foreign or domestic - but if it's foreign then you have a whole other set of issues.
Sometimes that Korean doc will open in an American version of Word and print in the lab, other times, it locks up Word and/or the print driver.
Since we switched to Open/StarOffice, this isn't even an issue anymore. Each student gets a copy when she arrives here, and we've never had a problem with language support, printing, or lock ups (well, since 1.0.1 that is!)
Re:What BSA Raids accomplish (Score:2, Informative)