I’m trying to figure out how to tell a customer that what they are doing is illegal, alot of company’s and individuals do the exact same thing and it’s just so common no one seems to know they are breaking the law.
I want to figure out a way to tell them with out sounding like I just want to sell them something else.
I would say just tell them and explain why.
We usually say “We only use and install properly licensed software as it both immoral and illegal to do so otherwise”
Beautifully phrased!
Put it in an email and send it to them… send it 1,2,3 times… This way if anything ever comes up and someone tries to point fingers at you… you have a time stamp that you attempted to notify them… its saved my arse several times.
@jjones_cgl What did it look like when it came back on you? Were they audited and they tried to blame it on you?
Whenever the subject comes up, I bring up the stories of a couple local firms that got busted and it almost broke them when the fines were levied, and explain as a professional I can’t take a chance on something like that. I also point out that I wouldn’t trust anyone that would lie about something like that because then you have to wonder what else they would be willing to lie about for money.
We manage a client here in Houston that is family friends with the owner of my Company… because of the relaxed relationship, they always felt that we would support their actions to push volume licensing past its “legal limit”, or have their “tech/office admin” use bad keys… then one day Microsoft randomly soft audits the VLSM account… They freaked out…and upper management blamed us at first… i had emails going back 3 years saying… Your out of office licenses… here is the quote to buy more… long story short, they paid us a project fee to clean up the mess and everything is only issued through VLSM and accounted for on a spreadsheet.
That’s a great story. How quickly relationships can change when $250,000 fines are at stake.
The same goes for letting people using your Internet connection. Like gusts and contactors. It can create problems because illegal software, or (illegal) porn.
Or the other way around,
You can create them a problem,
Let go of the cutomer if it doesnt comply with your standards after 1-3 mails, face2face with notes from meeting e.t.c
The headache that comes with a company using illegally attained software is a company that (someone else pointed it out above) does other scatchy things on other areas to compensate bad business moves or lessen the economic burdon cause they don’t understand that good IT-services actually costs money, or that there might actually be something totally legal for you to use, without paying (read free software/open source)