ComputerWeekly.com reports that safety specialist First Choice Facilities has been fined £18,000 by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) – the proprietary software industry’s licensing police – for unlicensed software following completion of an acquisition.
First Choice Facilities will now also have to pay an additional £81,000 to buy sufficient software licences to cover the unlicensed Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft and Symantec products they used.
Of course, First Choice Facilities could have avoided all this hassle in the first place in 2 ways – 1 expensive and 1 cheap. The expensive way is the route down which they’ve gone; the cheap way would have been to have used only free and open source software.
Hat tip: Alan Lord, the Open Sourcerer