Today the school district finished its software audit of the middle school where I volunteer. The goal of the audit team was to erase any software for which the school adminstrators couldn't provide proof of purchase, either from a purchase order or by showing the software box or installation media. This included software installed up to 10 years ago! I did a lot of hunting through ancient records to prepare, and the school survived with minimal damage. For a reason I have yet to understand, they erased some software that we purchased from Apple as part of a software bundle, but the teacher wasn't using that particular application anyway.
Oddest of all, they refused to let us keep the original black-and-white version of Kid Pix, which was still used now and then. The original version of Kid Pix, written by Craig Hickman in 1989, has remained unchanged to this day: freeware downloadable (from here) and described by the author here. The program's splash screen and About box both clearly say
Kid-Pix
Public Domain Version
This version of KID PIX is FREE.
It may be given away and distributed by electronic bulletin boards, etc.
yet the auditors erased it because we had no proof of purchase!
When installing software, I always keep the school legal, so this was a little insulting, even though, as a software author myself, I support the reasoning behind their audit. Teachers, like students, don't have a lot of spending money, but I think that, as role models, teachers should be especially careful not to indulge in software theft.
Does your school get software audited?
Oddest of all, they refused to let us keep the original black-and-white version of Kid Pix, which was still used now and then. The original version of Kid Pix, written by Craig Hickman in 1989, has remained unchanged to this day: freeware downloadable (from here) and described by the author here. The program's splash screen and About box both clearly say
Kid-Pix
Public Domain Version
This version of KID PIX is FREE.
It may be given away and distributed by electronic bulletin boards, etc.
yet the auditors erased it because we had no proof of purchase!
When installing software, I always keep the school legal, so this was a little insulting, even though, as a software author myself, I support the reasoning behind their audit. Teachers, like students, don't have a lot of spending money, but I think that, as role models, teachers should be especially careful not to indulge in software theft.
Does your school get software audited?
