Engineer culture: should companies buy genuine software?

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Office needs a lot of software, such as Photoshop and JetBrains IDE for programmers, which are often expensive. Should a company buy it or an individual?

If employees bring their own computers to work, but the company provides genuine software, what should they do if they leave the company and take away the genuine software?

These are the questions that every company CIO/CTO faces, and there are three scenarios:

• company purchase
• Individual purchases for the company, the company reimburses
• Personal purchase, the company does not reimburse

suitable for our company? This article will analyze.

1. Company purchase

Tencent purchased the JetBrains License server and deployed it on the intranet. The IDE is automatically activated every few hours and cannot be used outside the company network. In this case, the genuine software belongs to the company, and there is no need to worry about the problem of "resigning and taking away the software". Companies with sufficient funds are suitable for this solution.

2. The individual purchases for the company, and the company reimburses

Different positions require different software, and new software is constantly emerging. If the company updates and maintains a software procurement list, it is very cumbersome. If one employee wants to use a new software, and no one else uses it, this process is very difficult and inefficient.

So "personal purchase, as company assets, company reimbursement" is a way, but there are some problems:

• It is cumbersome to hand over the account after resignation, and it becomes "the company maintains a set of software asset table";
• It will lead to waste, and people who originally used free software also apply for paid software;
• Using US dollars to purchase foreign software, without invoices, it is cumbersome to reimburse domestically;
• Individuals tend to buy personal editions, and some software vendors prohibit reimbursement (eg JetBrains);

Company cannot purchase, reimburse or in any way finance the purchase of JetBrains Personal Licenses.

so only:

• Company purchases JetBrains Enterprise Edition ($499/year);
• Buy your own personal version ($149/year) or use a free alternative like VS Code (if you think it's not good enough, improve it together, which is a viable practice in the open source world)

3. Personal purchases, the company does not reimburse

Some software is also used at home, for example, programmers/designers pick up private work and do personal projects at home after get off work and vacation.

If the computer and software belong to the company, you need to open the company monitoring program to connect to the VPN, the result:

• "Modifying system files such as hosts" will trigger an alarm, and the company's security personnel will call immediately, after all, this is a "company-bought computer";
• Using software purchased by the company for personal projects and open source projects will lead to disputes over property rights. After all, this is "software purchased by the company";
  So some programmers buy another set of software themselves, and as a result the company buys it and wastes it.

From the perspective of clear property rights, "high salary, bring your own computer and software" is a good solution.

If the company offers low salary and does not reimburse genuine software, it is recommended to use free software instead.

Summarize

Some programmers hope that the games/software they develop will sell well and support their high salary, but they do not pay for using other software, regardless of how other programmers make profits and pay wages, and hope that other software is free for public welfare, while free software After the emergence of (such as VS Code), I feel that it is not as powerful as charging, and I am unwilling to participate in open source to improve it. This misconception will affect the construction of "engineering culture", resulting in a poor team atmosphere and difficulty in attracting outstanding talents.

as the CTO/CIO, must implement the concept of "prohibit piracy, all employees are genuine, and participate in open source". According to the company's financial situation, decide on the genuine software procurement plan:

• Personal purchase for the company, the company reimburses: not feasible;
• According to "whether the individual needs to use it", decide the genuine software procurement plan:
• Software that individuals also need to use (such as programming tools): individual purchases;
  More expensive software (such as Photoshop), individuals are reluctant to buy, and would rather give up for home use: the company buys and installs it on the desktop;

Teacher Yang Zhou's wonderful articles in the past are recommended:

Why is the company's computer stuck - because of the lack of engineer culture
Engineer culture: why BAT doesn't call the boss

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