BSA Piracy Study Deeply Flawed

zbik writes "Corante reports that The Economist has blown the lid off the BSA's recent report on software piracy (covered by Slashdot), referring to their methods as 'BS'. 'They dubiously presume that each piece of software pirated equals a direct loss of revenue to software firms.' The BSA has complained that the article is offensive but does not dispute their analysis. Score one for common sense."

Comments

"Offensive"

[hpa]

Sounds a whole lot like the Bush Administration being taken to task over internment camps... just say "offensive" and pretend it's not true.

Re:Much as we might laugh

[suitepotato]

Let's stop with the concept that "Free Software" is a solution. Software written by people whose food-on-their-table doesn't ride on doing it right, and not supported at all or by a cadre of geeks with a "RTFM, F off, TYVM, HTH, HAND" attitude, has to be configured ridiculously before use usually on an OS that also is ridiculously hard to configure for the average user, and bears no relationship with and probably is altogether on a totally different platform than all the rest of their stuff... well, that's NOT a solution.

I like Sun and Red Hat. Fine, use it for free, but don'te expect support. Pay us and we'll ship you shiny media in shiny cases with nice manuals in nice boxes and fess up when we fark up something. But the majority of "Free Software" clearly expresses the old adage that you get what you pay for.

Since Windows apps can be buggy at times because of coder idiocy and management demands for the impossible, immoral, unethical, or demented, usually all at once, but it is EASIER to use and integrate into the existing structure, well piracy will do nicely and if it farks up something, we'll merely go complain about Microsoft on Slashdot and act coy like we don't pirate and curse Adobe under our breath for what Acrobat 3 did to our Win95 machine eight years ago, despite the fact that we stole a copy from work.