Honestly thought, as engineers, is something that we need to be aware of and not just in VLCs case.
Part of the vetting process of whether an application is distributed should include a look at the EULA and at least a skimming of any potential legal issues. One knock on the door by the BSA and that's all you need to get a shutdown-of-your-business-level fine.
Every EULA is different. In some cases, even the same term is defined differently. Free for "personal use" may mean, really, honest to goodness, use it only at your house. I've also seen "personal use" defined as being fine to use, for free, if you yourself installed it, as opposed to some sort of centrally managed system (e.g. Casper, SCCM, etc) installed it. So in that case, you could be working at IBM or Apple and even if you had Casper on your system, but you yourself installed it and you use it the course of doing your job, you're fine to use it for free.
Some software is free for Educational use. Some software is discounted for Educational use. How "educational" is defined is often in the EULA and even there it's not often clear. Take for instance our case, MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Technically, we're an arm of MIT. Though, there are no students at this campus. No faculty at this campus. No teaching actually happens here. We're a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federally_funded_research_and_development_centers) Some vendors still consider us as Education just because we're a part of MIT. Others consider us federal government. Others, including Apple, we're in a quasi odd place with. According to every EULA that we have for Apple products, we're education. Though if we try and buy things at EDU pricing, it's rejected because our vendors (including Apple proper) see us as government.
So, I guess the moral of the story is to do due diligence when you're distributing software. When someone comes knocking, you're on the hook for it and ignorance is no defense.
j
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Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure & Operations
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436
