On Tuesday 13 October 2009, shirish शिरीष wrote: > in-line :- > > On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 00:59, jtd <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Monday 12 October 2009, shirish शिरीष wrote: > > Were the softwares already licenced? > > I don't know if you mean by the OS or some others. Most probably most > of them were unauthorized copies.
Both actually. And it seems things havent changed. Around 2002 there was hughe thread on ilug-bom about helping cyber cafes to avoid the eula trap. At the time i had done an informal survey at Mumbai, Goa, Pondicherry, Chennai, Kochi and Chandigarh. Without exception every one of the cafes ranging from 2~4 to 60+ nodes used illegal copies of everything from OS+Office suites to pagemaker, Photoshop, Tally, any number of games etc. The argument at the time was that cybercafes were a struggling cottage industry and had to install illegal stuff due to customer demand and that linux was hard to use. some of us had offered to build a distro that took care of everything, subject to buying specified listed hardware (primarily to minimise graphic and sound problems) and offer free training to maintain and run the show independently. The secretary of the cybercafe owners association (or some such) had started a thread about enlisting our support to protest some government move which would make cybercafes un profitable. My survey found that while the small guy was actually concerned about legal software, the larger guys did not care one bit, with many selling rips of everything on the side. > > > The "cleanup" post session would be necessary to ensure minimum liability > > if raided by the cops for piracy. > > I don't think so. Apart from the OS and office software, didn't see > any other high-value (thinking Adobe here) software. > > and these softwares were available even after the systems were restarted. Ok. > > > Did you by any chance find out about cops checking the register / any > > reporting that they have to do? > > I did ask about it, but the answers were at best evasive. I wanted to > venture further but something like that does take little bit of > relationship building and as for me there is little incentive to do > that right now. Ok. -- Rgds JTD _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
