Submission + - Software Piracy at Beijing Branch Office (resub'd)
spirit_fingers writes: "I'm the IT manager for a west coast design company that has a small branch office in Beijing with 5 employees, a few workstations and a couple of servers. Recently, it came to my attention that the Beijing office has been routinely installing and using pirated software on their computers--MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, mostly. Up until now, the powers that be here in the States have had a relatively laissez faire attitude about what goes on at the Beijing office and our accounting department never noticed that Beijing never submitted receipts for software, until I questioned them about it.
We're very buttoned up about being legal with our software here at the home office, and I consider it unprofessional and risky for our Beijing office to be engaging in this practice. When I called our Beijing office manager on this, he shrugged and replied, "well, every other shop here does it".
I have no doubt that this is true. Frankly, I could care less what those guys do with their personal computers, but when it comes to company-owned gear my attitude is to stay legal no matter what anyone else is doing. And it's not like they need to do it to save money. The Beijing branch turns a tidy profit, thank you very much. It just seems to be an attitude so firmly ingrained in the culture over there that no one gives it a second thought.
So I was wondering if there are any IT manager Slashdotters here in the the U.S. who may have experienced something similar with their colleagues in APAC and how they would handle a situation like this. My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using and see what happens (this came down today, so I'll give them a day or two to come up with something)."
We're very buttoned up about being legal with our software here at the home office, and I consider it unprofessional and risky for our Beijing office to be engaging in this practice. When I called our Beijing office manager on this, he shrugged and replied, "well, every other shop here does it".
I have no doubt that this is true. Frankly, I could care less what those guys do with their personal computers, but when it comes to company-owned gear my attitude is to stay legal no matter what anyone else is doing. And it's not like they need to do it to save money. The Beijing branch turns a tidy profit, thank you very much. It just seems to be an attitude so firmly ingrained in the culture over there that no one gives it a second thought.
So I was wondering if there are any IT manager Slashdotters here in the the U.S. who may have experienced something similar with their colleagues in APAC and how they would handle a situation like this. My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using and see what happens (this came down today, so I'll give them a day or two to come up with something)."
