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Microsoft has many proprietary weapons with which to wage its war on software pirates, but fear mongering? That too can be open sourced.

Congratulations to the people at OpenOffice for creating an “awareness campaign” that uses Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance’s (BSA) own so-called statistics and intimidation against them. It’s all there: the estimated 35 per cent of software that Microsoft says is counterfeit and/or otherwise illegal, the warnings about piracy detection software, and the BSA’s ongoing prosecutions of suspected offenders. There’s just one difference. OpenOffice’s solution to Microsoft’s piracy complaints is to encourage users to adopt its own software, which can perform many of the same functions as Word and Excel but which doesn’t raise the grim spectre of a software audit. People used to say that open source suffered from a lack of good marketing. Maybe what it really lacked was some good counter-marketing.

The other part of this joke is that Microsoft and the BSA (including CAAST, its Canadian equivalent) doesn’t factor open source in to its piracy calculations. It makes an estimate on shipments, but many PCs will increasingly make as much use of Linux and open source software as they will proprietary, including desktop applications. It is a real sign of the open source community’s maturity that it can pitch something like OpenOffice on the basis of protecting customers from Microsoft’s piracy police and its complex licensing agreements. Less than two years ago, Microsoft reacted to SCO’s prosecution of various Linux companies by insisting its products were safe from litigation. Now it’s the open source firms that are promising protection, but of an altogether more common form of prosecution.

Will it work? Yes and no. The fact is that Microsoft licensing is complex, and asset management is not a fine art in most enterprises. Most IT departments would be unable to say with any reasonable certainty how much Microsoft (or other closed source product) is scattered across their organization. Audits are still going to happen, and proprietary firms will be sure to see this as opportunity to plead their case with the firms that are thinking of moving in an open source direction. That’s when they will start talking about reliability, about functionality and about security – even though open source proponents are fully prepared to defend themselves against all such attacks.

For something like OpenOffice, it’s going to be harder to make a real argument against open source, although the debut of Microsoft’s Duet this week means a substantial evolution of how MS Office will integrate with back end systems such as those supplied by SAP. The ability of OpenOffice to unseat Microsoft Office in the Canadian market will depend in part on the degree to which small businesses here use things like mySAP or Business One, or whether they have drawn a roadmap that connects such productivity software to customer relationship management or business intelligence systems.

You never seem to hear about someone pirating ERP or CRM software. Maybe we think of office applications as so rinky-dink that they don’t merit copyright protection. That could change if Microsoft and OpenOffice can advance their products into something more critical to business operations. Once you’re dealing with a product that’s really worth something, the pirates may be prepared to leave it alone.

sschick@itbusiness.ca

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