Free Software for NGOs

I would just like to forward you to a blog post by Brad Smith as of today: Anti-Piracy Enforcement and NGOs.

There is one statement I would like to quote:

To prevent non-government organizations from falling victim to nefarious actions taken in the guise of anti-piracy enforcement, Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs that will ensure they have free, legal copies of our products.

This step makes sense for a couple of reasons.  First, it builds on our existing work to provide NGOs with donated software, which we’ve been doing for many years in the United States and have expanded over the past few years to over 30 countries, including Russia, where we launched the Infodonor program last year.  Under our existing program each NGO can obtain free of charge six different Microsoft software titles for up to 50 PCs.  They can then obtain 300 new licenses every other year.  In the past year, we donated software with a fair market value of over $390 million to over 42,000 NGOs around the world.  (Clearly, we’re trying to donate our software to NGOs, not focus on them as anti-piracy targets.)

One challenge, however, is that some NGOs in a number of countries, including Russia, are unaware of our program or do not know how to navigate its logistical processes, which involves ordering the donated software through a Microsoft partner.  We’ll solve this problem by providing a unilateral NGO Software License that runs automatically from Microsoft to NGOs and covers the software already installed on their PCs.  We’ll make this new, non-transferable license applicable to NGOs in a number of countries, including in Russia.  We will also make it available to appropriate journalists’ organizations in order to include small newspapers and independent media.  Because it’s automatic, they won’t need to take any steps to benefit from its terms.

I think that this is a great development!

Roger

Roger Halbheer

Roger Halbheer is an Executive Security Advisor at Microsoft in EMEA acting as a trusted advisor to CxO. Before that he was a Managing Director at Accenture's Financial Services. Before joining Accenture, he was the Chief Security Officer of Swisscom (Switzerland's largest telecom provider) and the global Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft.

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