1 Mar
2003
1 Mar
'03
6:45 p.m.
I remember reading about this some time ago.
The BSA is running into a very interesting problem: Their heavy-handed
tactics are driving customers away. Basically, they got their $90K out of
Ernie Ball, and went away short-term happy, so Sterling decided to make
their long term numbers suffer.
Anyone want to start a betting pool on the next company to switch to
Free/Open Software due to the BSA?
The thing is, though, is that Ernie Ball is a relatviely small company,
and making a complete switch (almost literally overnight) was not that
difficult for them. Now what would happen if, say, HP got hit by millions
in fines from the BSA (other than more layoffs...)? They wouldn't have the
ready option of switching because they are too big of a company.
Since most music companies are smaller (Yamaha being a notable exception),
I wonder if any others have plans to follow suit just to avoid an audit...
Anyone know?
-- Darren
Jan \Evil Twin\ Depner
I know that there are quite a few musicians on this list so I thought
they might be interested in this (if they didn't already know about
it).
I was reading an article yesterday (I don't remember where) that was
talking about the BSA fining businesses for unlicensed software. Lo
and behold, the first business cited (for 8 unlicensed copies of M$)
was Ernie Ball/Music Man. Apparently they got stung for $90,000.00 US.
The article stated that Ernie Ball immediately switched to "open
source" and never looked back. Being a curious person, I sent an email
to Ernie Ball to find out what "open source" meant. The answer is Red
Hat
Linux. It's nice to see a fairly large music business getting the
message.
It appears that the BSA may be one of open source's biggest allies.
Jan
Regards,
Darren Landrum