Usage of Pirated software at a company

Posted by hakesh on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by hakesh
Published on 2010-12-31T07:04:09Z Indexed on 2010/12/31 7:59 UTC
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Hi, I am redirected from stack over flow since the topic is ethics rather than about programming. Thank you for letting me know that. and please give me advices.

So, I started to work at a company as an engineer a couple of months ago. It's a small company and what they basically do is answering service on phones. Now they are switching from normal phones to IP phones so that computers take more important place in the work.

However, all the computers used by workers are equipped with pirated software ,even their operating systems are. Moreover, they don't even buy one license to make copies for other computers. In other words, they do not spend any money for the software in office. I am not saying copying a licensed one is legit, but the situation is too much.

There is one guy who did installing those pirated soft. He does not feel any sense of guilt and even justified when I asked about it. and he is not even a specialist. He just searched on the internet to install pirated software. Our boss does not have any knowledge of computers, so he took cheaper way.

How do you guys think about this? Since I am still new to the company, I am not doing maintenance or managing on those cracked computers. But I have to use those software daily. And later on I will be doing support, help desk kind of staff. I really don't want to take responsibility for operating pirated software. and from an aspect of developer and engineer, pirated software are not able to get legal support and it may work unexpectedly. So, I am thinking about changing job.

Am I thinking too much? should I wait until I have more credit from the boss and try to change his policy? So far, the boss does not take any words from me. Any opinions are welcome. Thank you

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