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Software piracy hurts the open-source community too

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OSS

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community. When stolen proprietary software is used by consumers, that's a lost opportunity for open source software makers to get their own software onto the computer hard drives of new users.

So says Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems Inc. for the OpenOffice.org open source project, who discussed the phenomenon here at the 10th annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

"Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say 'why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,'" Suarez-Potts said.

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Is open source hurt by piracy?

blogs.zdnet: Louis Suarez-Potts, who is community manager for Open Office, suggested that many users disdain open source because they can get proprietary titles “for free.”

This is true, but it’s unclear to me what the open source movement should be doing about this.

There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?

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re: open source and piracy

Hard to tell what's more pathetic.

The fact that soooooo many people have no morals and willy nilly steal software.

Or the fact that most open source software is sooooo crappy that so many people are willing to risk breaking the law by stealing proprietary software rather then use the crappy open source stuff.

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