Dave Ihnat wrote:
However, this is a program for your benefit, not ours; and complying will necessarily require involvement from our staff. All AWC staffers who are required to assist you in any way will be billed at the rate of $250/hour. We require a prepayment retainer pool be paid in the
It's a good idea but they will probably agree to it. If you have, say, 100 users with laptops in your organization, you don't really know what they have installed on them. Once you let these guys in they can just sit there using automated tools looking for anything on any machine put there for any reason by anyone and you'll be liable.
If those 100 laptops are on FOSS, it's likely the worst they'll find is media players with no patent license, since FOSS boxes tend to just have FOSS on it [1]. Attacking under Patent law for a handful of instances is a whole other ballgame than the streamlined and cheap way of attacking under Copyright law, it's not the shakedown game these guys are in. They're looking for Office and a FOSS solution makes it much more likely they'll just find Open Office and you giving them a GPL suppository.
It's great when the MSFT masks slips and people can see the naked greasy shakedown artist inside, it's the perfect reason for people to consider a 'hassle budget' for a move to FOSS.
-Andy[1] I have vmware and XP on this box, but that is the exception rather than the rule. In particular the virtual XP filesystem has almost no apps on it other than the technical app I am forced to have the whole mess for.
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