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Posts: 2,006 | Thanked: 3,351 times | Joined on Jun 2010 @ N900: Battery low. N950: torx 4 re-used once and fine; SIM port torn apart
#228
Originally Posted by burmashave View Post
Huh? An even split in voting?
And I have tried to make the split more even.

Originally Posted by burmashave View Post
As was said, theft is theft. Would you consider walking into a store and walking out with a boxed version?
A boxed version is a material object. With material objects, theft is clearly defined. But with electronic representation, like software... By copying it, a software "pirate" doesn't take the original away from the legal owner.

Originally Posted by burmashave View Post
Also, not having money is a pretty weak excuse. If the software is really important, you could save up to purchase it -- just as you would for any other product.
If software is really liked, then the human will pay for it, sooner or later. At least, by word-of-mouth advertising.
If the human is forced to use the proprietary software because of the company's monopoly and bad practices, pirating becomes much more easier to justify.

Originally Posted by burmashave View Post
Entrepreneurs invest and people work hard to develop intellectual property. If you developed intellectual property, how would you feel if people who "felt they could not afford the software" pirated it?
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A jocular comment:

You say:
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work"
I reply:
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"

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Now, a pretty common case:

1. a human gets a new computer; it has a new Microsoft Windows OS on it;

2. the human doesn't like the OS at all;

3. but the computer is very good, and there is practically no legal/easy way to downgrade to previous, more acceptable version of Windows;

4. the human "pirates" the previous version of Windows;

5. the installation CD with the newer version of Windows is tossed into a box and covered with dust;

6. and later, with about 20%-30% probability, the human starts to use Linux instead of Windows.

Now, there is pirating of software clearly involved, but the human has already paid for the newer version (which he doesn't use), and he "pirated" an older (and supposedly cheaper) version. Therefore, the human has caused no financial harm to the manufacturer.

I don't pay attention to the clause "student with limited financial resources": in the case described, the pirating is entirely justified even without it.

Of course, the above-described isn't the only reason of pirating.

Some people have to upgrade their operating system and/or office suite because Microsoft haven't considered backward compatibility (if A communicates regularly with B, B pays for Microsoft Word 2007 and starts sendings docx, A tries to read it on Windows 2000, he cannot do it - at least, special formatting, like equations, is lost - and A is forced to get Word 2007, and therefore Windows XP, too; and then "limited financial resources" along with Microsoft's absence of support for older software, might force him to pirate some software).
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Now, what's the reason people still use (and pirate) Microsoft's Word, when there is OpenOffice.org?

For many people, the reason is Word's non-standard but comfortable "MathML" equation editor. If OO had anything similar, but with Standard MathML and could save it as standard XHTML, people would enthusiastically go for it. At least, some people.

Microsoft Word has crashed a lot (often damaging the document by the way).
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What's the reason people still use (and pirate) Microsoft's Windows, when there are many different flavors of Linux?

Mostly, habit. Also, some favorite programs: Word, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Media Player. When OpenOffice.org will be able to read flawlessly my old .doc and .docx documents, and save new documents as XHTML with MathML and SVG integrated, many switches to Linux might occur.
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Sorry if I sound like life-long advocate of piracy of Microsoft's products.
In reality, I don't like piracy at all.
But, don't blame poor consumers for being forced by a monopolist into getting a program, even when they get it by pirating.
If you want to blame somebody, blame the monopolist (who ties the operating system with the computer, the programs with the operating system, etc) and the people who try to take a pirated copy of software and sell it as a genuine one.
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