In a recent Fox News story, Geek Squad, a subsidiary of Best Buy, the national electronics retail chain has been accused of using pirated software. This isn’t really surprising. Reuters, the financial information and news wire service, constantly pirated software for use at special events. So do many other large corporations. What is surprising is that the story even made the news.
Of course, Winternals, isn’t a software conglomerate like Microsoft or Adobe, and they have much more to gain by pushing forward with a lawsuit against Best Buy. The story describes how Best Buy was in negotiations with Winternals, supposedly to get a commercial license for their Geek Squad division. Then Best Buy dropped out of negotiations, saying they were no longer interested in licensing the product. No need to, they stole it instead. This is similar to what Microsoft did to Burst.com in this case.
Microsoft lost to Burst.com, proving that the little guys do sometimes win once in a while. Hopefully Winternals wins a big settlement, as they make good software, which is pretty reasonbly priced.
Its good to see the little guy win some of the time.
Dwayne