Linux "is not piracy" Says Microsoft Lawyer

dipfan writes "Further to this Slashdot piece on the activities of the Business Software Alliance, the BBC reports on a European conference on piracy organised by the BSA. The good news is even Microsoft distinguishes between open source software and piracy; it quotes Microsoft's top in-house lawyer Brad Smith as saying: 'Linux is a way of developing software whereas piracy is copying.' The rest of the article is the usual panic-attack about the size of software piracy in general, and how this is holding back the software industry in Eastern Europe, according to Brad. Although the article notes the irony that despite all the piracy, software sales are forecast to grow from $50 billion in 2000 to about $90 billion by 2005."

Comments

Still Unclear on MSFT's Strong Dislike of Linux?

[ackthpt]

Here it is in a nutshell:

Ideas developed and shared undermine Intellectual Property. i.e. If you invented a better moustrap and GPL'd the design, then MSFT wouldn't be able get a patent on it, and thus license for big fees or lock any other developer or competitor out.

Having to include source to something they didn't invent and can't get along without is their problem and, like any reasonable minded person, don't want problems. They like to keep it simple, by owning or having license agreements on IP.

How anyone actually associates Linux with Piracy is beyond me and reflective of a lack of understanding the spirit of MSFT's gripes.

I think their numbers may be off

[quinto2000]

"We can't estimate how much piracy is on the net but in one day we found a million sites under a search for one of the codenames for pirated software," said a BSA spokesperson"

They forgot to mention that all of the sites had the same broken links to servers that had only porn popups, not warez.

And wow, it sure took them a long time to figure out the "codeword" for pirated software :)

Re:BSA

[chill]

Just now? They've been all over Orlando for the last year and a half. The company I used to work for got their HQ (Long Island City, NY) audited and scared the hell out of the Orlando office I had converted to about 1/3 Linux. They forked over big $$ for licenses they don't need, use or want -- just to avoid the hassle.

The BSA is nothing more than a legalized protection racket.

Easter Europe

[pmancini]

The remark about piracy holding Eastern Europe back is partially right. In Russia, Ukraine and other states you can pick up just about any software for next to nothing. Imagine paying $1.80US for Windows XP Professional? The piracy rings there are so good you get it fully cracked, you get it in nice packaging and if you need help they can sell you a ton of books that have been scanned into PDF format also on CD.

The problem isn't piracy. It is a lack of respect or even awareness of Intellectual Property in my opinion. There is no respect for it at all, it seems, in these countries. Their legislatures are just now starting to examine laws concerning it. I am not sure which industry is bigger: China's piracy rings or Russia's. In China the piracy goes to aid specific Red Army units (in fact the rings are allegedly controled by Army Generals).

It is an interesting problem. While we want to business with these countries, lack of protections makes it nearly impossible. At least under the rules and structure of Capitalism. While those rules can lead to our current situation where we have an agressively bad and dangerous monopoly controlled by Bill Gates, they generally are good and promote sane business practices. My hope is that Eastern Europe reforms. With China, I don't see and end coming to their ways of doing business.

Well, at least they are making that clear

[JudasBlue]

This is probably off topic, but I feel the need to share it.

It is easy for those of us hip to the open source movement to laugh at this crap from MS, even though we know that some end users and such might be taken in by it. But the depths to which MS FUD penetrates the general IT community is bloody incredible to me.

Yesterday I was talking with a mid-level QA engineer from Apple. This guy is working on a very complex product. He knows how to code.

We start talking about software development, and I mention some things I am working on, mostly centered on Linux. At which point he says:

"That's cool, but anything you do on Linux you would have to give away for free, right?"

Contrary to what everyone is thinking, this guy isn't stupid. He isn't even technically inept. He works on a complex project and knows what he is doing in his problem domain.

Anything that MS might say about Linux and open source that isn't totally negative should be lauded, because a LOT more people than some of us realize, people we think should know better, apparently are buying pretty much everything MS is trying to spread about open source and Linux.