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Compliance strategies

Since market-ready, open-source CAD applications won’t be available anytime soon, how can architects make sure their company avoids a threatening letter from the BSA enforcement division? The first step is for upper management to articulate a formal policy regarding licensing, says Ken Sanders, FAIA, chief technology officer for Gensler in San Francisco. “Architects have a reasonable expectation that clients will comply with the terms of the contracts they sign—so it’s reasonable for us to comply with the software licenses we sign, even if we don’t always think they’re the best terms,” he says.

In addition to communicating that philosophy to employees, Sanders says senior managers must be committed to such compliance in their own minds. “If you express ambiguity, people take cues from that,” he says. “You need to sit down and talk from the standpoint of how acting this way is part of being a good citizen. You may not agree with all the copyright laws and think it’s not reasonable to restrict the use of software, but at the end of day, when comes down to an agreement you have signed with another party, you must honor it.”

GASP, by Attest Systems, is one of several tools that helps firms manage software licenses electronically. The software can run reports that help IT managers determine if they have enough copies of products available for the number of users needed. Image: Courtesy Attest Systems

To ease the logistics of compliance, IT directors suggest purchasing network server licenses of software applications whenever possible. In this model, a predetermined number of “seats”—say 10 licenses of a CAD application for a department of 15 designers—reside on a single server. Any 10 people may use the application at a given time, but the system locks out additional users until somebody logs off. This relieves architects from constantly monitoring usage to make sure no one is using a program illegally. Currently, Autodesk and Bentley Systems offer this licensing arrangement for their respective products. However, other vendors important to architecture firms, including Microsoft and Adobe, don’t provide these types of licenses. “This means we have to manually keep track of, for instance, who has Photoshop installed in each machine, which is difficult,” says James Brogan, AIA, IT director for Kohn Pedersen Fox. “I’m disappointed there isn’t a server license for these other software packages.”

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Third-party auditing programs are also available to help IT departments keep accurate records of licenses and software installations. These products include Express Software Manager from Express Metrix, KeyServer from Sassafras Software, Inventory from Altiris, TS.Census from Tally Systems, and GASP from Attest Systems. Prices are based on the number of computer users in an organization. A 100-seat version of GASP costs $22 per seat. (The BSA Web site lets companies download a free trial version of GASP, which will audit 100 computers for 60 days.)

Theis, of Roger Ferris + Partners, says architecture firms, especially larger ones, that don’t make use of auditing software face “a nightmare” trying to comply with licenses. “You could spend hundreds of hours” matching what’s on each computer to a master list of licenses, he says.

Keeping this information in an electronic record helps a company not only stay in compliance, but also know where it stands if an audit letter arrives. If that happens, Zielinski tells his clients to respond quickly and honestly, even if they’re not in compliance. “We counsel clients never to swap out hard drives or reformat disks [to hide illegal software copies]. That only makes things worse and really makes you look guilty.” Instead, he says, companies should conduct internal audits to understand how they got out of compliance and what they need to do to resolve the problem. The subsequent fines may be stiff, but this avoids walking the plank into a federal courthouse.