Risk of buying Microsoft software

You can be forced to go through software license audit process, which will be done by the Microsoft’s Sales department.

Note the emphasized word above – the result of the audit may very well cause you to buy more software licenses, which you may not need. This is because Microsoft thinks that using its own auditing software, instead of a neutral third-party’s, is the unbiased way to do it.

“Wait a minute, how can Microsoft audit me at anytime whenever they feel like it, using their own tool ?”.
It’s because you’ve agreed to allow them do so.

And not only that, in the EULA, it’s also stated “Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this EULA“.

Good thing Auto Warehousing Co. can afford good (and I assume, expensive) lawyers, so they managed to avoid the audit. Others are not so lucky.

Note that other (proprietary) software vendors also tend to have similar EULA.

If you think this will not happen to you, think again.

Auto Warehousing Co. is just a victim which happen to be brave enough to speak out. In Indonesia, there were even raids done to big companies – we’re talking about insurance companies, banks, etc here. But they’d rather settle quietly than to acknowledge that they have licensing compliance issues.

Conclusion; if you’re a big company and able to hire good lawyers, you’ll be safer from this. And chance are, you can afford the settlement cost if it turned out that you have licensing issues.
But if you’re not, try to avoid purchasing software with crazy EULA like this. You might just regret it later.

5 thoughts on “Risk of buying Microsoft software

  1. I’m totally agreed with you, those cray EULA should not be exist in our country 😀

  2. ada yg punya kumpulan link/artikel ttg razia bsa untuk perusahaan/corporate bukan warnet?

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