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Piracy Built the Romanian IT Industry
An anonymous reader submitted a link to a Washington Post article about a very interesting press conference. Romanian President Traian Basescu stood up in front of international press and discussed the role pirated Microsoft software played in bringing about the IT industry in the country. The other big player at the press conference was Microsoft chair Bill Gates. Gates' company was opening a technical center in Bucharest, and he declined to comment on the president's remarks. Romania passed anti-piracy laws nearly 10 years ago, but nearly 70 percent of software used in the country continues to be of an illicit nature.
The United States economy was initially built on slavery, but I don't hold it against them because they've cleaned up their act. If you sold drugs to make enough money for rent but quit once you were on your feet in a job, I wouldn't hold it against you. Yeah, I realize those are flame bait analogies but that's just how I feel. If Romania's infrastructure was built on piracy, I certainly hope they clean up their act--there are plenty of FOSS alternatives out there that are not as well supported as Windows apps but certainly can do the job with a lot of time and effort.
What they're doing is illegal. I hope the president was acknowledging this and leveling with Gates so rarely does a politician shoot straight, let's enjoy this rare moment.
My work here is dung.
US refused to pass any copyright laws in the publishing industry
till the time there were enough US authors whose rights needed
to be protected. When Charles Dickens visited the US, he saw his
books sold legally all over the place & he wasn't getting a penny
out of these sales. He complained to the US Govt repeatedly but
of no avail.
But publishers who were "pirating" his books in the US made
enough money to kickstart the publishing industry in the US.
Then a time came when there were enough US authors whose
rights had to be protected & that's when the relavant laws
were passed & enforced in the US.
Something similiar is happening in Romania wrt the software
industry.
Actually the 'piracy' the president refers to was not illegal, speaking strictly in legal terms. There was no legislation at that time that prohibited the use of unlincenced software thus making it legal to use it. Not surprisingly, that's what you get after a 50 year communist regime, but things quicly changed (I think the laws regarding this were passed around '92, 2 years after the fall of the communists).
About the illegal activities that you are so adamant about are not that widespread: foreign news only report such news. Heck, that's natural, who abroad cares about any good things going on in Romania, unless there's some investment opportunity. I know I wouldn't. Problem is that Romanians seem to be pretty good at these activities, thus the 'fame'.
All due respect. You don't know what you're talking about. And yes, you are generalizing and I am pretty sure that you don't have any *valid* statistical data to back up your claims. And you are really trying to be a smartass.
Anybody with a little capacity for analysis can give you the reason you only hear stuff like that of Romania: that's the way news bulletins work. Why would an American news station be interested in the fact that Romania has the second fastest growing economy in Europe? No... let's find the few individuals who are into stealing, and bank machine rigging, and so on. Those will always make good headlines.
Do a little research, maybe travel back in time 15 years or so, and you will see how life has changed in Romania since the falling of the communism. Before saying things like 'nobody will ever change it' or 'I have a lot of evidence to back all that (shit) up', think about the following: you know of about some thousands (at best) thieves and so on who may or may not be Romanians or of Romanian descent... but there are more than 30 million of them around the world. That's 0.01%... not a valid statistical point.
As for the government admitting openly that their people use pirated software... it's one thing to admit it and another thing not to care. First thing is called 'honesty'. Your government won't admit anything wrong about their people, period.
As for the Romanian IT people... there are fewer of them than in U.S., that's for sure; after all, U.S. is more than ten times bigger in terms of population. But the top guys (and girls, yes, girls!!) are on par with their U.S. counterparts. Granted, Romania is not a huge emerging market like China or India, and that's why the largest companies aren't establishing factories there. Also, Romanians are not that cheap, and they will get more and more expensive because of the accession to the European Union. But there are companies that have a well established history there, Alcatel, Siemens, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle are just a few examples.
I don't know exactly what is it that disturbs you so much about Romanians, but you could really use a cold shower. Please take a look into your own back yard and if everything is OK there, you can go ahead and bark at others.
One of my Comp. Sci. professors gave a talk to our ACM chapter about once a year or semester, describing his experience as a computer scientist in Russia. He had worked on a chess-playing program back in the '70s, and became a professor there.
Part of the talk was the history of Russian computing. Essentially, it was a lot of reverse-engineering of big IBM's. IIRC, it was Romainia that was assigned the task of reverse engineering the system OS machine code. Having to do it this way gave the programmers intimate knowledge of systems and assembly, and consequentially in the 80's produced some hardcore virus & worm coders.
So I wouldn't really expect their attitude toward software to be quite the same...
Well... same thing in Malaysia, Indonesia and China... Alto anti piracy law exist for such a long time, ppl just dont gives a rats ass abt it simply because law enforcement officer thamself is also using them. You think they use original software on the personal computer? Yeah rite~~~~~
In 1990-1993, Romania just started to understand what democracy is, there was no concept of licenses, rights much like in other countries (see for example the story of Tetris and its licensing problems on Google Video). Even more, there was barely any economy and computers used to cost a fortune. A computer I think used to cost about 6 or 7 salaries, without software.
.. police raids companies or finds hackers or people guilty of piracy.
Also, even if you wanted to buy legally software, there were no companies that could legally license you software. You couldn't buy software legally because the percent of users buying software was so small, it was not profitable for companies to make stock of software products.
Later, companies started to build computers and offered preinstalled software and operating systems legally but even then there were problems with gray market (smaller companies could not afford to compete with large computer builders buying license in large volume and used to buy small volume of windows licenses from Hungary and other countries - later the BSA declared these licenses not valid and companies had problems).
Nowadays, almost all companies are using licensed software because there are laws about it and whenever the government has to prove something to the European Union or licking USA's ass
With home users, piracy is larger but that's mostly because some people can not afford it. The minimum wage is about 120 dollars and Windows is about 140 dollars (if you included taxes).. Private companies offer wages usually starting from 300 dollars.
So our president is right, but you don't have to take it like he agreed to it and thought it was OK. It was not but you can't change the past.