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The Pirated Software Problem in the 3rd World
RockDoctor writes "Dark Reading carries an article by one Nathan Spande who works in Cambodia. Locally he finds that OpenOffice.Org and MS Office are the same price ($2), or $7-20 by downloading. He discusses why the economics of OpenSource don't work in this environment, and how it contributes to global computer security issues through the "little extras" (trojans, spambots and other malware) that typically accompany such "local editions" of software. The economics of software outside the west are very different to what most people are used to."
is that it creates a level playing field.
Both MS office and OpenOffice are available at the same price and with the same level of support (precisely none apart from what google'll provide you with).
I'm not quite sure why there's any kind of surprise about this information. In the western world where you have to pay for MSOffice and Open Office is free, MS Office is still winning - why you'd expect a different result in an environment MS Office is free, is beyond me.
In my humble opinion the best thing to increase the penetration of Open Office around the planet (along with linux and every other OSS product that competes with MS) would be if MS introduced a completely secure DRM system to ensure that not a single un-licensed copy of their software was unable to function anywhere on the planet - forcing those that couldn't afford it to switch to OSS.
Always amuses me when people here bitch about WGA, as it has the potential to be the greatest force in switching people to OSS.
From the information in the article, it appears that the economics of open source work much better than the economics of closed-source, proprietary software. The business model of OpenOffice.org is perfectly happy when local vendors sell their software at $2 per disk. The business model that Microsoft Office is based upon is violated when that happens.
This is exactly how Microsoft kills off the competition.
They tolerate piracy because it has benefits for them. If people are pirating MS software, they are learning how MS software works, and they aren't using competing software. They can catch up later and demand their money; by which time, they're betting, most people will already be so used to Microsoft that they will pay up rather than go for a cheaper / free alternative.
If MS clamped down on piracy right now, then people would switch to cheaper / free products in a heartbeat.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
god and all that is holy and sacred on the planet ...
Free Software is not, repeat NOT, about cost. It's about liberties that accompany the software. For instance, in these poorer countries they're free to choose the hardware/software combos that suit their budget and economy, and not what Redmond wants them to use.
It also gives them access to the formats and internal workings. Meaning local jobs supporting the tools [ports, language packs, addons] are possible organically without having to first sign your soul over to msft [or whomever].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
WGA and other drm does not work with slow links. How can you sell apps that need to be online for checking if they are legal and licensed with forced big updates / patch downloads when you need to pay $0.10 or more a mb.
The Pirated Software Problem in the 3rd World
No, it is not a problem there at all. Pirated software is problem only in 1st World.
There you are, staring at me again.
Essentially, pirating commercial software is a display of resistance against the concept and economics of intellectual property. The concept of "owning" ideas or things that can be "stolen" without taking property away from the "owner" is simply not inherent to humanity (compare that to stealing a car, where the person stolen from actually loses the car).
However, the resistance that piracy implies isn't sufficient. Free software (and other free knowledge) is a revolutionary concept that turns the base structure of the new information economy upside down. It allows everybody to share knowledge and self determine what they can and will do (as compared to accepting the limits imposed by "owned" knowledge...like accepting that powerpoint is the way a presentation should be made). This is much more important for the poor, especially in the third world, who do not have the capital to access source code and thus see how software (and the world) work.
When using closed source software, one is essentially giving up the possibility of determining how you communicate and think in relation to machines -- and other humans. Having spent the last several years in the third world studying this specific issue (in Ecuador), it is clear that the availability of commercial software for a dollar or two is very dangerous for those countries. Any country that doesn't have a policy of supporting Free software is essentially allowing Microsoft, etc. to determine how it thinks and produces. Big software companies have no problem with this, they know that they wouldn't be selling large quantities of their software in poor countries anyway. While they may care about the big markets (China), I think most of their complaints about software piracy in the third world aren't because they care about those areas, but because they want to make sure that Americans know that piracy is an evil thing that foreigners do.
Unfortunately, most third world governments are so pathetically corrupt/incompetent that they don't take the freedom of Free software seriously. Some recommendations would be making all government sponsored software open sourced, requiring all government documents to use open standards, making public universities use free software, etc. There are several governments working on this, but they are few and far between. It is too bad, because the third world can benefit even more from Free software than the first world can.
And I'm talking from experience here.
10 years ago Buenos Aires was in the same situation as described in TFA, and the pirated software sold in stores was mostly clean. I know there was no market for zombie machines, but there were lots of (very good) viruses around. Selling infected software would hurt sales REALLY BAD. Especially since it would only take a seasoned pirate, hacker or technician to notice (and the latest antivirus was also available from most local pirates).
Most pirated software salesmen are interested in selling software, so they won't do anything to threaten their own income. The only thing some pirate shops would do is to add some intro/advertisement (and they were treated like scum for that). Most viruses came from diskettes from unknown sources.
GPG 0x1B479C78
The few times you encounter a virus-ridden pirate CD, it's surely because it was burned on a machine that was already infected and the virus managed to slip by.
(Just exactly the same as it happened for virus infected Ipods and similar players, which were infected because the XP machine on which they were tested as part of the development process was infected and droped virus on each tested ipod)
But that would happen nonetheless very seldom, because most of the software that is sold in this way is already downloaded in ISO form from the torrents and is directly burnt this way, and very few virus are able to injects themselves inside an ISO (althrough, a hacker could instruct remotely a trojanised PC to do so, and he would have the very obvious motivation you stated above). Very seldom are several different software unpacked, and all the SETUP.EXE from several different apps burnt together on a CD/DVD.
Most of the pirate CD you may find on those markets are produced by people genuinely interested in the fast money then can make with the small margins they have on the media they sell you.
(The complexity of managing and selling a botnet is beyond the interest in earning quickly 2$ for selling you a CD that costed them 0.02$ to burn)
The "All pirated spftware contain virus" is BSA propaganda. If you spend your whole time on "astalavista.box.sk", you may end up on some exploited web-page or downloading some trojan. But most of the pirated softwares you find in torrents are clean.
(My advice : switch to open source. You drop the whole stuff al together and get software that are both clean AND legal)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You know stories like this always make me kinda chuckle. The idea that people living in the third world have a "problem" with pirated software.
First world problem: My SUV costs $57 to fill instead of $51.Third world problem: My water is dirty and the market has no meat left.
First world problem: My son's team lost at their football championship.Third world problem: My son's school collapsed and 4 of his classmates died.
First world problem: My baby formula might contain GMO products.Third world problem: My baby is dying because of malnutrition and lack of medication.
First world problem: This war is expensive.Third world problem: My stepfather died in the hospital that was just bombed.
I could go on, but there's no point. All of this to say that when you don't have any real problems, you make them up.
The idea that intellectual "property" is on the same radar as food, drinking water, medicine, or hell even physical property in the third world is ludicrous.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
You can imagine it. I can't. I live in Hong Kong, I've bought a lot of bootleg CDs here and in Thailand. Never, ever have any been infected with viruses.
It makes no economic sense. The vendors make a couple of dollars per disc. They'd make at best a few cents per spambot. (And spambots in Cambodia? Give me a break. They don't have the connectivity.) But once the word got round that thay were selling infected softweare, they'd lose all their sales. These are people selling from market stalls; they stick around in the same place for months usually. If they sell bad products, they lose. Customers demand refunds. I have a few times when a disc was bad; a lot less hassle from these guys than legit dealers..
Every time you read an article quoting the BSA and such groups about software piracy they make this claim. It's just FUD. Note this writer never said he found viruses on his software, just that he was afraid of it. That's the "F" in FUD.
Actually, the editors trimmed off the second half of my submission, about how I'd brought some very capable software in Russia, and to my surprise it worked, was virus-free, and the online registration worked too. All for a $10/ 300Rb on-the-street price. (Abbyy Lingvo, a multi-linugual dictionary/ thesaurus/ pronunciation guide, if you and have a need for it. Worth recommending.) Why they chose to trim that half of the submission, I don't know (and don't particularly care), but the fact that the street price is so low must be quite scarey for Western software companies trying to increase their sales in non-Western countries. For comparison, the online price for Lingvo from the UK is "99 Euro/79,99 GBP", or about 150 USD. And obviously it's good for the "grey market". Need I add "DVD region coding" as another example of how scared content-control businesses are of non-domestic markets?
I don't have time to go through the commentary further, but I see that other commentators have been misunderstanding my point that 'the street price is (say) $2, but the download price $7-10.' That download price is calculated from the $0.10 price cited per megabyte, and is based on a vague memory of ~80MB for OpenOffice.Org. It seems that there are a lot of people on Slashdot whose appreciation of modern connectivity could seriously benefit from spending a month using dial-up on a phone service which charges £0.04 ($0.08) per minute regardless of whether you're downloading, uploading, or thinking.
Actually, I could see the courts using that as a punishment for cyber-first-offenders - you can choose between having enough money to eat, or to update your MyArmpit profile. Much more painful than simply siezing a convict's computer. But limp countries with injunctions against "cruel and unusual punishment" would probably object. Surely the point of punishment is to be cruel, and since every person is unique, then surely every appropriate punishment would be unusual. Raises the fun question of whether you want an "appropriate" punishment or an inappropriate punishment?
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