Small companies and software licensing

Question

Small companies with small budgets may not have have the money to invest in expensive software licenses that they may need for a given development project. This is even more so if the project was a loss-leader to drum up more business and the price of the development product cannot be renegotiated without potentially harming relationships, when it is discovered later that some proprietary expensive software license is needed for a very small yet crucial part of the application.

I have dealt with this in the past by cleverly using trial versions of software in potentially unethical ways just trying to delay or prevent purchasing the license.

What creative ways do smart software engineers work around this problem when the money to invest would be hard to acquire without breaking laws or stealing?

UPDATE: To give some context of a situation where free or open source isn't available, you have a signature pad peripheral device that comes with an integration plugin to Adobe Acrobat Professional. To use this device properly a PDF needs to be created with Acrobat and its accompanying plugin. The trial works fine for creating the PDF but what happens if the customer wants to modify the PDF a year from now? You basically just punted that problem down the road.

Answer 1

I don't believe that there is anything unethical about using a trial version of software for development and deployment.

I've certainly been caught in the situation where purchase order processing of run-time licenses for a library we used was so slow (we only ever ordered just-in-time so we could pay as late as possible) that we routinely installed the trial version. That gave us one month from install to get the dongle to the customer.

It also had the side effect that the customer knew that while they could use the software immediately, they would lose significant functionality after the trial ran out, giving them added incentive to sign the project off and pay us. *8')

Of course, this assumes that you aren't just hiding the true cost of your application by requiring some other expensive component, that would be unethical.

Answer 2

Use open source software?

If you want commercial software some companies offer deals to startups that can reduce the cost significantly, e.g. Microsoft has the BizSpark program.

[NB Full disclosure - I work for Microsoft. I'm suspect other suppliers have similar deals but I don't know for sure, but obviously if you work in a different stack you should check for relevant deals.]

Answer 3

Generally when you're doing a "loss leader" to drum up business you are already going down the wrong path. Business is the exchange of goods or services for money. If the project isn't bringing in enough money to buy or lease software, you need to re-evaluate your business plan rather then use pirated goods.

Companies can be burned alive if word gets out that they steal other products, especially if you're charging someone for your end result.

Answer 4

First, a company that doesn't understand the old adage You have to spend money to make money is a company that doesn't deserve to be in business; speaking from experience working at a horrible tiny company that wouldn't pay any money for anything, no matter how much it would help, this is incredibly short-sighted and indicative of a management issue at the very core.

To directly answer your question, there are legal ways around this depending on what you're talking about. For development, you can either use open-source technologies (lots of free IDEs, Databases, pretty much anything for PHP, Java, Python, Ruby and their friends) or make due with the Visual Studio Express editions (not an ideal solution but they work well enough).

If it's something that has no open-source alternative or "limited" trial, then see the first point. If it's something you need to run your business, then buck up and buy it, or re-evaluate if you really do need whatever requires that software to begin with. Management/Founders often think they need things that they really don't because they either read about it, somebody mentioned it or they're trying to ride a bandwagon, but if you're unwilling to play by the rules then, quite frankly, you shouldn't be allowed to play at all.

Answer 5

If you don't want to pay, either write code to do the same thing, find the lib that probably already does the same exact thing in your O.S., or go open source. The only problem with the open source stuff is that you are usually on your own when it comes to figuring out how to use a library. Their documentation is usually sub par, and the developers usually have jobs so they can't talk to you. For everyone that writes software to sell, there are usually 2 who write the same thing for a hobby and host it on github or something.

Also, most companies are willing to negotiate on price once they realize that the choice is either, you buy at a low price or they get nothing.

Answer 6

MS Express editions/BizSpark/DreamSpark(if you're a student)/open source. The thing you have to remember is that very few development products are actually necessary to develop with. They are nice/speed up dev times, but you can make almost any type of software with notepad and compile it with command line if you have no other choice. There are plenty of options out there. You should never feel that stealing/pirating is one.

Re: Your update:

I would try to find an open-source alternative to Acrobat. I have been using one called PDFJet with quite a bit of luck. Once you find that you will probably have to write code to make it operate with the plugin that you mentioned. This should not be too hard as they should have a published API. I don't believe this is unethical either because you are not de-compiling and reverse-engineering or anything, you are using a published API to create an interface.