piracy and oss

[Ben Pfaff]

"Marcel Kunath" <kunathma@pilot.msu.edu> writes:

> Not trying to start a flame war but I been thinking about
> piracy lately

First of all let's get our terms correct.  The word "piracy" is
propaganda intended to liken sharing copyrighted materials
against the wishes of its owners, a relatively harmless thing to
do, to killing, raping, looting, pillaging on the high seas.
Using this word kind of Godwinizes a discussion from the very
beginning.

> and I am coming to the conclusion that proprietory software
> piracy is hurting open source software more than the
> proprietors. I wondered what other people thought on this.
> 
> I just feel like using others people's keys and cracks it makes
> it easy for users to break the licenses on software they have
> not paid for. People therefore get a false sense of the
> software economy. People may have bought win95 and think they
> should be allowed for an upgrade to Win98 via a friend's CD
> Rom. It eventually cheapens the cost of prorietory software to
> a level far below the actual retail price. After doing this for
> a while and to tens of software programs one basically has no
> cost in gaining access to proprietory software. This gives the
> false picture of software being cheap. It also makes open
> source software look comparably expensive or at least less
> cheap.

I don't understand this argument at all.  Free software (I prefer
this term to "open source") can often be obtained at no cost at
all, not even the trouble of going out and finding a crack for
it.  How does this make it seem more expensive than proprietary
software?

> Shouldn't the open source community therefore actually work on
> eliminating pirates of our competitors' products and everytime
> we see a pirate report them to the corporations so that they
> get fined or forced to pay the license and the economic picture
> put into balance again?

I don't see any point in stooging for the BSA.  They have a lot
of money, let them go out and hunt down copyright violators.
It's not *our* problem.

> Reading about how organizations that donate old pcs get busted
> for invalid win95 licenses I don't feel sorry for them and I
> wonder if I be so heartless and rat out a friend who got tens
> of unlicensed programs on his/her PC.

Okay, suppose you do "rat out" this friend.  What's going to
happen?  Do you expect the FBI to come in and grab his PC to find
out?  Do you expect the BSA to do this?  Do you expect them to
send him a nasty letter?  I can't even see the last of these
happening.  The software publishers are not concerned about
individuals so much as companies; they cannot do much about
individuals.

> It just makes me angry that basically every unlicensed software
> usage is hurting open source software.

I really doubt this.  Most people who use proprietary software
are doing it for some reason other than the price.  Generally
it's because that's what everyone else is doing, or because it's
what they understand, or whatever.  I think that in many cases
they're more willing to pay than to learn.

> I am worried because I always run into people asking about
> Linux and I say you could pick up a prepackaged box for 40-150
> dollars at store and their eyes get big and they'd rather go
> for the iso download.

Maybe you should point them to cheapbytes.com where they can pick
up the same CDs for a couple dollars.

> On the other hand one knows their
> harddrives are loaded with tons of programs for which most
> don't have a valid license, allegedly. It just shows that
> people' perception of software cost in the proprietory arena
> are so skewed.

Are you sure that unlicensed software is so common?

-- 
Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@msu.edu> <pfaffben@debian.org> <blp@gnu.org>
MSU Graduate - Debian GNU/Linux Maintainer - GNU Developer
Personal webpage: http://www.msu.edu/user/pfaffben