On Reuben Goldberg's "Internet Economy" radio show on the 15 May 2009, the spokesman for the Business Software Alliance (BSA), claimed that the software piracy rate in South Africa has increased by 1% from 2008. The main reasons given for this where:

• easier access to international markets, such as Pakistan, which are, apparently, pirate havens,
• increasing broadband speeds and penetration in South Africa.

What is striking about all this of course, is that the fact that the world is in the biggest economic crisis since1929, failed to get a mention at all. Surely that would be a major factor behind businesses not paying for software which is of dubious value in the first place?

Small Business Sector the Biggest Transgressors

The sector that the BSA spokesman expressed the most interest in, in the sense that the BSA see it as the biggest growth area for piracy over the last year, is the small and medium business sector. One of the reasons they are interested in this sector, of course, is that it is easy pickings for license enforcement, with at least some chance of getting money out of the process. Luckily the BSA is keen on helping companies become compliant and to legalise their software. The way to do this, they claim, is to contact the vendors of your unlicensed software and come to an arrangement with them.

A cost-effective way to legalise your unlicensed software

Of course there is an cheaper, more cost-effective way, in both the long and short term,  for companies to become legally compliant with respect to their software licenses. When faced with this situation, where your company finds itself in the unfortunate position of having unlicensed software, or if your company wishes to reduce the annual licensing costs, an audit of the company's software and its usage should be undertaken.

Based on the results of this audit, a review should be carried out to ascertain what open source software could be used to provide the same services as the existing proprietary applications. Part of this review will include identifying servers and desktops that can be converted to Linux. Based on the results of this review, a pilot implementation should be carried out to verify the effectiveness of changing the proprietary applications to their free and open source alternatives. There should be no doubt that there will be some short term pain when converting but the benefits of making the move will far outweigh any once-off pain.

Only Pay Licenses for the Proprietary Software You Need

Once the results of the pilot are in, a final migration plan can be drawn up for the move to free and open source alternatives. Once this has been done, the remaining proprietary software should be audited for license compliance and any shortfall should be rectified with the commercial entities behind the software.