Fed Raids Software Pirates in 27 Cities

akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The Feds have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my burned Linux CD's. They might think it's some weird hacking tool."

Comments

Thats not the point.

[HanzoSan]

Piracy has absolutely NO effect on programmers salaries.

The only effect it has, is on Bill Gates Salary. You must be a programmer. What? You think they will pay you more if piracy didnt exsist? Hell no, You'll make the exact same amount of money that you make now. The people who will get paid more are, Steve, Bill, and upper level management. NOT YOU!!!!!

This issue has absolutely no effect on you at all since you dont get paid on a per sale of software basis anyway, you get paid to produce the code.

If you ever heard of open source philosophy, programming is a service, the code is not a product, but information. Information is to be shared. Service is to be sold.

Sell your service to Microsoft. If Microsoft wants to try to get rich off of the information your service produces and somenoe pirates from Microsoft, Microsoft gets paid a few less million, so what.

I dont see this effecting the information producers, just the people who try to sell water in the desert it effects.

Federal piracy and entrapment

[baudbarf]

"Bandwidth, through the joint efforts of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General (EPA-OIG), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), supervised by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Nevada, created a 'warez' site, controlled and monitored by the undercover operation, as a means of attracting predicated targets involved with the distribution of pirated software. The undercover 'warez' site has been accessed to transfer over 100,000 files, including over 12,000 separate software programs, movies and games."

So not only did they use entrapment; but they were themselves accessory to over 12,000 incidents of software piracy!!!

Did you know. Time to teach you some facts.

[HanzoSan]

Mandrake has a programmer on the kernel team?

Did you know Mandrake has a developer working on KDE?

Did you know Mandrake offers FREE services to teach linux to newbies? Mandrake Forum, Mandrake Expert, etc etc

Did you know Mandrake developers millions of lines of source code all which get contributed back into the community? I assume you arent a programmer and dont know the VALUE of good source code.

Did you know Redhat brought Linux to the mainstream by donating millions in making good software?

Did you know Redhat created RPM which you most likely use?

Did you know Redhat has developers on the kernel team?

Did you know Redhat has developers on the Mozilla Team?

Redhat and Mandrake do not profit off of their software, their free websites, hell this site Slashdot is only up because a certain Linux company is hosting it.

And if you dont respect the code redhat and mandrake has contributed to OUR favorite OS, if they were to take it all back, your hardware drivers suddenly wouldnt work, your kernel would be buggy and messed up and at version 2.2 or somewhere, you wouldnt have a nice KDE, you'd be stuck with an ugly interface, you wouldnt have the ability to play games, Linux would get no support when going up against Microsoft and others.

Redhat has done alot, what have you done? You havent contributed code, they have, you dont contribute money, you are a leech. Now go home.