I joined a startup/company yesterday as intern and they told us we'd have to bring in our own laptops. I was kind of fine with it but then today they also told me they would need to install ubuntu on it (the work they do is node.js/android so unix type system is not a requirement) and format my system drive as well. I think that's crazy. It's my system and I should be able to control what happens to it. Yes I can of course quit but this should not be a thing.
The reason they gave everyone is that they cannot risk people using pirated windows but I don't have a single bit of pirated code on my system and they still insisted on it. I was hoping to probe good people of HN to see what they think. I realize they can request whatever they want and final control still lies with me but I think this is very personal invasion of my privacy and rights to my own rig.
And my laptop is a lennovo yoga the flex version, it has touch screen and screen folds back. It's semi hybrid version and Ubuntu would look laughably bad and criminally useless on my machine. Not to mention I have all my workstation set up on it. I told them I have genuine windows which will be rendered useless and their response was that I can always take my machine to the service center and tell them to install windows again. My internship is 6 months long so all this trouble would only be for 6 months to begin with.
I tried to negotiate quite a bit but they don't seem to budge. Dual boot, VM, or just working with windows all don't seem to make any dent in their resolve. If I cannot resolve it tomorrow I will have to either escalate it to top management (it's a small 300 person company) or just give up and leave.
I am not looking for any legal recourse, instead I am just trying to find your take on the matter.
PS Ask HN part is malformatted and bring is brng to go around the 80 character limit.
Furthermore, the excuse provided here seems flimsy at best: their IT has a legal defense if the laptop was private property (ie, yours) and using a pirated copy of Windows. From a technical perspective there are very easy ways to check if the copy of Windows on your machine thinks it is genuine. Furthermore, there are tools that Microsoft provides to do that in an automated fashion, because Microsoft has considered and supports Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to the Enterprise scenarios in Windows itself and provides tools to help companies do that and more successfully walk the tight rope between corporate security and overreach into dictating what an employee may or may not do with their own devices.
(At worst, this excuse seems like just a way to assert control over employee's personal lives/property solely for the purpose of having said control.)