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Arse covering...

Posted 03-01-2013 at 06:05 AM by mafiltenborg
Updated 03-01-2013 at 06:07 AM by mafiltenborg

At work I have a Debian box, which serves as sniffer, logger, data injector and a whole array of other odds and ends. All the stuff it's not possible to coerce the company-issued standard Windows box to do.
That's nice. Linux happily goes to work and gets the job done.

Now, my company recently merged with another american company. And as a consequence of this, new, strict regulations apply to what tools we're allowed to use.
This includes ONLY properly licensed software. That's okay by me. Software piracy really isn't my thing.

The difference between then and now is that our new company management actually enforce this policy IRL.

Properly licensed software + Debian should be no big problem, right? Wrong.
The people managing software licensing only seem to recognize paid, individually licensed or as a minimum individually "approved by Legal Dept." software. Thus, Debian was suddenly outlawed.
Any linux was outlawed.

Sure, I can recognize the good intentions here, but being flatly denied any access to any linux whatsoever, appears to me to be more of a "We don't know how to deal with that, so you're not allowed!"-approach, rather than a rational and logic-driven one.

Debian users in general try to do the right thing - our intentions are positive. That's why we're using Debian. Read the Debian Social Contract to see for yourself.

But the - american - Legal Dept. seems unaware of this fact. Any and all arguments have been flatly rejected. The closest thing to an actual reason for rejecting my proposal is that "they can't process all these software packages".

I think what's wrong is that the issue requires 'something else' be done than just validate the invoice and the license terms. Perhaps the simple fact that this is not 'Windows' strikes fear in the hearts of whoever lives under the "Legal Dept." rock.


How does one convince these people that it's not dangerous to try something new - or at least newish? Debian's been around for a while now.
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