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."

Comments

Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the big group releases do NOT have Trojans and other crap inserted. the big release groups pride themselves in having a clean release.

I love how the article has BSA FUD stuck in to add that little flair of "security problems".

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[reynaert]

Most of the big group releases do NOT have Trojans and other crap inserted. the big release groups pride themselves in having a clean release. Right, but he's not talking about big release groups. He's talking about cd's sold on Cambodian markets. I can quite imagine one of those vendors wanting to operate a spam network on the side.

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[brouski]

That's great for the people that get them first-hand from the group's FTP server.

What about the schmoes who have to wait until the release has changed hands dozens of times before it hits a public site or the newsgroups?

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can quite imagine one of those vendors wanting to operate a spam network on the side.

I'm in Thailand, and I assume the situation is pretty similar. Copies of new release software go for about the same price here anyhow. What you're saying is possible, sure, but I think pretty rare. The guys who sell this stuff are just not that sophisticated - they download it all from the net and burn the CDs on a handful of PCs. Some places burn the CDs on demand - you have to wait 10 minutes for an unlabeled disk with a poor quality photocopy for a cover. Of course, you still have to worry about the hackers who created the image.

By contrast the DVD rackets are clearly organized crime of the highest calibre. The product there is in general very good quality, packaging would pass for original, pricing is around $2/dvd. I've heard it said that stuff comes from southern China, but it's hard to tell.

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[kingduct]

The street vendor is just a poor person trying to make a buck. He or she almost surely doesn't even own a computer. Now, the person pressing the CDs is another matter altogether -- there I could imagine trojans. Certainly in Ecuador computer viruses are out of control, but I've always attributed that to the fact that since fewer individuals own computers, many people are sharing each machine.

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[orkysoft]

They forgot to mention that most Microsoft products come with their own security problems built in!

Of course, it is entirely possible that the pirate sellers add some extra nasty stuff to their warez, I wouldn't know, I've never bought software from pirates.

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[cursorx]

True, at least of Brazil. Pirate software always comes clean, and tech support is usually stellar (I'm not kidding, some of these guys will give you their phone number and walk you through any problems you might have).

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[QuickFox]

virii do happen Viruses.

Re:Nice Suttle FUD in the article.

[numbski]

It doesn't work out of the box in Wine, but almost everything works in Crossover Office. Wine comes pretty generic, presuming that you would prefer not to use any Windows cruft at all. Crossover comes default presuming you want things to just work. And work it does.

Worth the money if you must have Windows software IMHO.

Way I look at it

[goldcd]

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.

Re:Way I look at it

[Lumpy]

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.

I also bet you believe we are winning the Iraq war, GW saved us from WMD's and the easter bunny is real as well.

Here are some major facts. Microsoft products have a earth sized avalanche more marketing than Open office does. If you go and ask 100 random people chances are that less than 3% will know what open office is. Hell they even get high schools and colleges to market it for them by offering "office suite classes" that are nothing more than a 10 week marketing class they get people to pay to go to( in college).

Do the same in businesses, survey 100 CEO's and CTO's less than 10% will know what Open office is. Business leasers also feed the marketing themselves.. Where is that powerpoint(tm) your excel(tm) or word(tm) file?

So by your logic, people are choosing Microsoft office because it is better while in reality most people do not even know a choice even exists.

Re:Way I look at it

[FallLine]

I also bet you believe we are winning the Iraq war, GW saved us from WMD's and the easter bunny is real as well.

This is basically a lame implied ad hominem argument. Don't listen to him! He believes in the easter bunny!

Here are some major facts. Microsoft products have a earth sized avalanche more marketing than Open office does. If you go and ask 100 random people chances are that less than 3% will know what open office is. Hell they even get high schools and colleges to market it for them by offering "office suite classes" that are nothing more than a 10 week marketing class they get people to pay to go to( in college).

Besides the fact that you only present one "vague" fact to support your argument (not even a specific relevant number) this is a total non sequitur. The mere fact that MSFT spends X million dollars of marketing does not mean their their success owes entirely or even substantially to it (particularly true when we know of several other majors factors here).

Marketing does not always win the day--superior products and better prices usually do. The US car industry has vastly outspent their Japanese rivals year in and year out and they've lost market share to the Japanese year after year. Microsoft has spent a ton of money promoting products at various points in their historic with little if any pickup (e.g., TabletPC, Windows CE, MSN vs Google, Internet Explorer vs Mozilla, etc).

Meanwhile you ignore:

1) That Microsoft Office has been the standard for many years. Customers know the product very well because they've actually used it for thousands and thousands of hours. Open Ofice has only very recently approached some level of equality (features, UI, stability, compatibility, etc).

2) Customers would have to deal with less than perfect file compatiblity (my actual experience) or at least the chance that it won't be (no proof that it is). Even if you believe that it's 100% compatible with Office 2003 and all earlier versions, how are potential customers supposed to assess if and how quickly OO will handle the new Office 2007 format, say, when their business associations start sending them documents in such a format?

3) Customers have to learn a new UI. This takes time and money.

4) Customers have to contend with lack of VBA and lack of automation compatibility. You'd be surprised how many applications and corporations are wedded to Office because of this. Try exporting from Crystal Reports into a spreadsheet, many corporate DBs, etc.

5) Customers face business risk with potential uncertainty with Open Office due to their lack of business model (Sun is still driving most of the development... there's no obvious organic driver for continued growth and support).

6) Lack of features and stability for advanced users.

7) Just plain unknowable risk. Open Office is still an unknown quantity in the most corporate environments. If you spend many man hours assuring yourself that it's kosher you might sleep well, but it's far from plug and slug change.

These are just a few of the real concerns with respect to customer adoption. Yes, Microsoft Office is completely over-priced given its widespread adoption and I'd be glad to see OO take marketshare from MS, but to completely dismiss Microsoft's continued success here as simply owing "marketing" is nonsense.

Do the same in businesses, survey 100 CEO's and CTO's less than 10% will know what Open office is. Business leasers also feed the marketing themselves.. Where is that powerpoint(tm) your excel(tm) or word(tm) file?

I was a CIO fairly recently for a mid-size corporation (and later for a division for a major corporation). I knew about Open Office and considered deploying it internally (instead of renewing SA - $$$), but I ruled it out due to some of the reasons I mentioned (e.g., cost of modifying internal applications, lack of compatibility with many shrinkwrapped packages, increased memory, having to deal with decentralized VBA scripts, potential issues with Citrix, etc). I wouldn't expect a CEO to know about this sort of thing if can't even make it past most IT managers.

Yayyyy!

[LiquidCoooled]

Open-source trojans.

Can somebody point me to the repository so I can include them in my projects?

"the economics of open source don't work..."

[John_Sauter]

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.

Re:"the economics of open source don't work..."

[richg74]

What we are seeing here, actually, is that Economics 101 works. In a free, competitive market, the theory says that the equilibrium market-clearing price of X is equal to the marginal cost of supplying X. It seems likely that the (small) marginal cost of producing an OpenOffice CD is about the same as that of producing an MS Office CD. So it's really not at all surprising that they sell for the same price.

The "business model" of MS Office (as well as that of DRM'd music, for example) is based on attempting to engineer a way around this reality -- trying to create an economic perpetual motion machine.

How Microsoft Kills Competitors

[ajs318]

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.

Re:How Microsoft Kills Competitors

[pandrijeczko]

In addition to this, of course, is the fact that legal users of MS software pay a premium high price that finances those that use pirate copies.

Re:How Microsoft Kills Competitors

[indraneil]

I kinda support this poster.
I stay in India and out here a Microsoft employee would be looked up to, a Google employee would be recognized and a RedHat employee would be given condescending looks for not having been "talented enough to get a job with MS" :-) I pretty much do not know a single person who runs no non-pirated software in their home PCs. Heck my 1st computer came with Win2k preloaded for free. On the other hand, getting opensource stuff is harder. Infact I bought Fedora 4 CDs on EBay. So I got Win2k free but, FC4, I had to buy!
Out here, people adore Microsoft for doing the world a favour by bringing out tools like office and giving them an OS they can use. It is only the top universities where students get to use Unix. Every one else (barring software companies), pretty much runs on pirated Windows.
I suspect it actually helps Microsoft- more familiarity with their products, greater evangelism for their software, and may be some day, MS can get these people to pay for the same as well. Not sure if this was an intended fallout though

Re:How Microsoft Kills Competitors

[Mr. Shiny And New]

I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense; There is no material difference to Microsoft between one pirate user and one non-user. This isn't like a retail store that sells goods, where stores raise prices to cover a certain percentage of shoplifting. If someone pirates a Microsoft product, Microsoft is harmed in the "lost sale" but they still make money on their other sales. And in a region where basically ALL software is "pirate", Microsoft can essentially forecast zero sales and be done with it.

Anyway, the so-called "economics of open source" obviously won't apply in a region where none of the "economics" of software apply; as someone else mentioned it's really Microsoft's business model that falls apart here. Microsoft's supposed high prices aside, Microsoft isn't making any sales in regions with very high piracy; but one day they will convince the powers that be to crack down on it, and the users will suddenly realize the trap of Microsoft software; just look at what happened recently in Russia: Schools are switching away from all non-Free software because they can't afford the costs, and their governments are making them stop pirating software. Then it will be abundantly clear what the difference is between the two "economies" of software.

Re:How Microsoft Kills Competitors

[grcumb]

(Background: I live and work in what the UN classifies as a Least Developed Country. Everything I offer below is based on my experience here, building ICT capacity in this country and the region.)

They are here in the developed world by turning off automatic updates and further locking down their products while going after small businesses that aren't using officially licensed products.

The same thing is happening here. But when I brought this issue up in a national-level mailing list (to which the majority of IT professionals in this country are subscribed), the issue was treated as a technical one, not a moral or ethical issue. Put simply, the debate went only as far as how to stop WGA, but did not extend there. Pirated software is a fact of life here, and given that this country hasn't signed the Berne Conventions on Copyright yet, people have no compelling legal reason to change.

That said, geeks here know what FOSS is about, and they're very interested in it. I recently did a demo of XGL/Beryl, and everyone in the room was lusting after it. On the server side, people recognise that if you don't have Linux on your resume, you aren't competitive. So where the geeks are concerned, Linux is the New Frontier, and they really like it. It's quite interesting that there's a direct correlation between Internet access and interest in FOSS. It more or less parallels our experience in North America and western Europe.

And now, management are beginning to feel the pressure to move to FOSS. More on this below....

Yet, no matter what, people are not going to switch en mass to the free alternatives because they aren't ready for the desktop, people aren't comfortable with them, and the interoperability (while better) still isn't good enough to allow for people to "switch in a heartbeat".

You're overestimating the problem. I can tell you from experience that some of what you say is true, but not nearly to the degree that you assume. Geeks here actually really like Linux, and they love to get a chance to use it. I'm working a lot of overtime here providing Linux training to the people who run the government's IT infrastructure. Their intention is to reduce their dependance on Microsoft specifically because of licensing and support issues.

See, a Microsoft rep arrived recently and shook the government down. That is to say, he threatened to require that the government pay full retail for all its licenses unless it came to some terms. In the end, an agreement was reached wherein the government pays a flat fee for access to a number of supported applications, and it is required to buy an OEM OS license with every new PC.

Moving some of the servers from 2003 is seen as a gimme; the planning for that is already under way. There is a recommendation in place to move all standard workstations to OO.o, with exemptions being given to those who specifically require Microsoft (i.e. those who run VBA-powered automation utilities, or who create very sophisticated documents whose compatibility cannot be guaranteed).

Just about every business in town either has or is planning to integrate non-MS software into their systems. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the biggest one is cost.

So Microsoft is driving people away using exactly the tactics described in the GP post, and people are moving away, but you're right to say that there are interoperability issues (no thanks to MS), and that there is some trepidation. It's just not as bad as you seem to think.

People are planning the transition, and they are content to do it in small, achievable steps. But they are moving to FOSS.

The same applies to South America...

[TavoX]

I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I can say that although it is somewhat easy to find a shop that sells legal copies of software, most people just buy a pirated copy... why? because it's 1 dollar per disk, and the worst thing is that people do not see this as a bad thing... Personally, I don't agree to pay loads of money for legal software, I just use Linux and OSS, as most people would do if pirated software didn't exist here, but it does, so OSS has not much sense here anyways.

for the love of ...

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:for the love of ...

[ardor]

You didn't read the article, did you.

The poor DO NOT CARE about free-as-in-freedom. OpenOffice does not give them the chance for getting a job, MS Office does. So MS Office wins.

You can start thinking about free-as-in-freedom once your belly is full.

Re:for the love of ...

[WS Tu]

And we can think it in another angle...
The software in Combodia is not scarce, therefore it is almost like water or somthing very cheap there.

And now the only scarce thing for them is the job. I would never suprise people want to use MS office since the employers (may be they never heard about OpenOffice) would like to give offer to who know to use MS Office.

Re:for the love of ...

[tomstdenis]

And that's the largest failing of the FSF and FLOSS as a whole.

If the message was more about "hey you can really do what you want with this" and not "hey it's cheaper than Windows lol!" they'd be better off.

Tom

good luck trying to stop that

[fbhua]

This means fundamentally changing the way people live.

Let's take the case of Bangladesh. We have about 150 million people here, although a large chunk of that figure aren't your potential customers.

Facts:

- All foreign-produced movie DVDs and audio CDs are pirated. Yes. All. You can't legally buy legit copies of this stuff there.
- All home / office use software is pirated, unless you're working for a top multinational company. Purchasing a computer implies that it would come loaded with whatever software you prefer.
- All games are pirated

The prices are astonishing. It costs about 1 USD for CDs, 2 USD for DVDs. It doesn't matter what's the content.

How do you promote any software when Adobe Photoshop is the default image editor? When a software developer can choose any tool he wants with zero licensing and distribution costs, guess which platform wins out.

People want the best software and want access to the latest music and movies. It's been very low priced since forever. I can't imagine how would anyone go about asking them to change their consumption habits.

No "piracy is theft" argument doesn't work here. People feel that they have the right to rip-off any foreign-produced stuff because those companies are profitable anyway.

Re:good luck trying to stop that

[owlman17]

This means fundamentally changing the way people live.

That's right. It all boils down to mentality. I live in a 3rd world country as well. I make enough to get by (it's downright pathetic by 1st world standards though). However, I always make it a point to pay for non-FOSS software I buy, even though, yes, I can get the disks for $1-2 or just download them off warez sites. Those I can't afford, I make an effort to look for a FOSS equivalent/alternative.

I also buy legit CDs and DVDs. If I can't afford something I like very much, I save up for it.

I'm probably more of an exception than the norm where I come from, but it doesn't mean its impossible. And I have a feeling a number of people in 1st world countries have a "third-world mentality" when it comes to this.

WGA and other drm does not work with slow links

[Joe The Dragon]

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.

Re:WGA and other drm does not work with slow links

[jackharrer]

Point is that WGA was made not to disable the software. If you disable it, people will go somewhere else. Main point is to remind users they're running pirated software. Switch off features that aren't necessary, and hook them up on windows not Linux (MacOS is out of scope, if you don't have cash to buy Win do you have cash to buy Mac?).

MS knows that piracy exists, but at the same time piracy creates a lot of well skilled users.

Broadcasting???

[evilviper]

One of the interesting things about Open Source is the completely unlimited distribution rights.

Besides putting it on the net, and distributing CDs, and USB driver, there's also the possibility of broadcasting it... A few minutes on a TV channel, either terrestrial or direct broadcast satellite, and you can transfer an entire CD. Just mux in some open source software into your DVB broadcast, perhaps only during times when the video can do with a lower bitrate, and some quite inexpensive equipment, that takes just one-time investment, can pick it up.

Also, in most of the underdeveloped parts of the world, I have to wonder if 802.11 isn't the perfect answer to all of this... Even if only a few people in all of the country can afford to download something, it may be able to be pushed to everyone else with 802.11 cards, through P2P apps such as Gnutella, (bittorrent is woefully inadequate here... and on unreliable networks in general).

And for the first open source program to be widely distributed through Asia with one of these methods... I nominate ClamWin.

Well, he's partly right

[cathyy]

He's right about the difficulty in getting legitimate copies of software. He's right about there being a virus, trojan, and spyware problem, too. He's wrong about the reason. It's not infected pirate copies of software. As the previous poster said, those copies are clean.

It's the people who buy the latest best copy of Norton anti-virus...pirate...and never get a virus definitions update because they can't register their program. They think they are safe and protected, because they are running an antivirus program.

It's the people running pirate Windows and IE and Office with no updates or patches, because even if they can register them (and typically they can't), they don't have the bandwidth to download security updates.

And I'm not talking about mere individuals. I have observed the counterfeit Windows version message on the computers in hotels, and not a cheap ones, either. What else are the corporations supposed to do when legitimate software can't be had, and your English isn't good enough to make calling Microsoft to buy a license to legitimize your pirate copy a viable option?

How do I know all this? I, too, live in a third world country, specifically Thailand. I have looked for legitimate software. I have seen pirate software in major foreign-owned stores like Tesco and Carrefour, as well as in the well-known locales for pirate software like Chatuchak and Pantip.

Re:Well, he's partly right

[cbhacking]

My family are slowly travelling the world (5+ years so far) and I'm currently visiting them, in Malaysia and Thailand. We don't do hotels (for staying at), but hotels, resorts, and Internet cafes provide our connectivity (usually via WiFi). Despite all the nice services installed (Skype is very popular), I would never use one of the computers here for anything serious... forget online banking; I probably wouldn't even check my email on one.

Even if one assumes that the owner of the establishment doesn't have their own spyware and keyloggers (software or hardware) installed, and some earlier visitor didn't install any (neither of these are great assumptions to make, but most people seem to anyway) I still assume somebody is, in effect, looking over my shoulder recording my keyboard and screen in video. These machines just don't get updated. Even the ones running SP2 will be using IE6 (forget Firefox). They might have Avast! or AVG, and it might even be up to date, but that's the best you can hope for. I'm sure somebody, somewhere uses Spybot S&D or AdAware SE Personal, but I haven't seen it... Of course there's no chance of Defender.

A friend of mine loaded a copy of AdAware and scanned one computer in an Internet cafe, and found eight different spyware or keylogger applications running. The owner of the shop sounded concerned (they're very polite in Thailand) but he did... nothing. Either he didn't care, he put them there himself, or there's nothing he could do.

Re:Microsoft benefits from piracy

[DarkOx]

Windows Vista Ultimate Chair Throwing Edition

Now that is a gread idea. I am along time Slackware user and have never looked back. I do remember windows 95 reatail version comeing with a great game called "Hover" It was lots of fun, and was probably one of the better things about win95.

If there was a version of Vista that came with a game called "Balmer" it would be exactly the sort of thing that would get me back on the windows platform. Just think you could play a Steve and run from floor to floor and building to build on the M$ campus thowing chairs at precived enemies. Just like in good old Duke Nukem 3d when you scored points he would chant something like "Hail to the king baby" only Steve could start saying something like "Developers Developers Developers..". It would be the greatest FPS game concept ever.

Re:Might even increase ad rates

[evilviper]

In fact, that might be a way to increase what advertisers pay.

I wouldn't think so. It's just as likely no humans are watching the program to begin with.

At ten minutes of ads per hour and 2 Mbps of the stream dedicated to the zipfile

2Mbps is probably 2/3rds of the entire channel bitrate, leaving very crappy looking commercials (they typically need a higher bitrate than regular programming, not the other way around).

Microsoft will have to win, eventually

[exit3219]

Because everybody's using Windows around here (Moldova). And when things will become more "civilized" and software will actually be paid for, people will have nowhere to go and will buy their products. So in the long term, Microsoft would have nothing to win if they fight piracy here. That's why they don't.
I use Linux because it's a better environment for programming. They use Windows for free, because they play games (for free). The "because it's free" argument won't convince anyone to try Linux around here. It costs more to download a distro via dial-up, then to buy Windows for $2.

Oh that is bollocks

[goldcd]

and quite frankly pathetic to say that the reason MSO succeeds where OO hasn't is merely down to MS's marketing budget.
CTOs know what OO is. If an enterprise CTO deployed OO and saved their company millions, they'd get a big gold star. The reason OO isn't deployed so widely is because if it were, stuff would 'stop working' and cost the company more.
Now you could argue (rightly) that there's nothing wrong with OO, but if you deploy it in an MS ecosystem (both your own systems and the stuff that'll come in from outside), stuff will stop working. OO's pitch is pretty much "We'll get 95% of your Office documents opened and working" - problem is that last 5% will cost more than you'll save by not coughing up for the MS license. It's not right, it's not fair, but it's a fact - and something the OO plugging CTO will be made to answer for.
Just to come back to your point on marketing, there are many countries that MS don't even bother with now, due to the levels of piracy. Surely if OO were the better product, then it would flourish without the evil MS marketing dollar - but they just don't...
If I pirate MSO, I know I'll have less problems than I do legitimately downloading OO. OO currently offers 95% of MSO for free - if you consider MSO to be 'free' then why on earth would you take that over something that offers 100% of MSO for free?

Wrong

[Maljin Jolt]

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.

Revolution

[kingduct]

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.

Re:Revolution

[Chandon Seldon]

But can you tell me, if I write software for a living -- who will pay me so that I don't starve to death if all software was free?

Compared to the total number of professional programmers, the number who work on proprietary software for sale is pretty small. The vast majority of programmers work on custom software for internal use.

The majority of programmers working on free software also have a day job working on non-free software for said large evil corporations (e.g. IBM) so that they can feed their families.

Bullshit. The number of Free Software programmers who write proprietary software for sale as their dayjob is so small as to be irrelevant. What's this non-free software that IBM sells that all the free software developers are supposed to be working on? DB2? Lotus Notes? I'm sorry, they're not. A lot of the Free Software guys at IBM actually work on Linux or Apache full time - it's their job at IBM.

Even among the programmers who *do* work on commercial proprietary software for a living, a lot of them would be *completely unaffected* if their software turned into Free Software overnight. Consider Solaris, or Java, or Netscape, or even something like Google Talk which isn't free software today.

Re:Revolution

[Chandon Seldon]

That's a whole bunch of different questions, and you're trying to get at something that really isn't there.

Not every company can afford to hire programmers to write their internal use software.

First, companies contract programming firms for custom work all the time. That's normal, and it's nothing special. It works exactly the same as internal programming, completely separate from the issue of Free vs. Proprietary software.

From a practical standpoint, an architecture firm doesn't necessarily want to hire someone to write a CAD application internally.

And every company with a web page doesn't want to write their own web server. If people need software it gets written.

Why is it not valid for them to pay someone else (like a commercial software company) to do it for them? How is that different than contracting a construction job to someone else? Why should such software come for free?

Why is it not valid for them to work with their competitors to develop the application as Free Software? How is that different from a bunch of companies in the same office building getting together to have a parking lot built? Why should the people who want the software have to pay for its marketing costs?

Seriously, the leap to Free Software just isn't that big a deal, except that it gives people more options. Today, if you wanted a new feature in AutoCAD, you'd have to convince the developer to add it - with some developers that's impossible. If you want a new feature in Apache, you hire a programmer. In the AutoCAD case your competitors *always* get access to the feature. In the Apache case you have a choice - you can keep the feature to yourself if it's a big enough differentiator to warrant the maintenance cost of a fork.

Re:Revolution

[Chandon Seldon]

Why the hell do people keep bringing up communism?

How is an environment where every programmer is free to bid on every software project "communism"? Really, contrary to what you might here from Microsoft or Verizon, "capitalism" isn't a word that means "everything is controlled by a government enforced monopoly".

Not Redmond, but vendors

[charlieman]

At least here in South America, when you buy a pc, it comes loaded with software, from windows and office to games, photoshop, autocad, etc (you name it they install it, of course they don't know anything about OSS).

People barely can decide by themselves, mostly because if it's their first pc, they don't know anything about software so just try to get everything they could possibly need from start. If it's not their first pc, then all they know about software is what came with the first one, and ask for the same. Some people not even want the newer versions of the software they use, just the same they've been using so far.

The same applies for companies, here people don't choose the software. It just happens to be in the computer and they use it.

$2.00/day for 12 hours of work ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The great majority of the planet is no where near the US economy, or even better countries like Japan, South Korea, or Germany.

How is a business that pays its workers $2.00 US a day for 12 hours work supposed to buy Microsoft Vista in a $2000 computer?

A 486 with xubuntu Linux running
enough power to keep records and communicate with the world by dial-up modem,
and that business might be the most wired business in town!

Not everybody can run out and buy a $500 iPhone with a $100 month phone plan (even if they could get cell coverage in their area...)

Parent is wrong

[Ernesto Alvarez]

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.

More probably...

[DrYak]

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)

Re:More probably...

[mpe]

The "All pirated spftware contain virus" is BSA propaganda.

IIRC there have been cases of "legitimate" software containing viruses. Thus it's possible that any pirated version originating from the same source. The ultimate irony would be if the "pirate" version had been cleaned in such a situation...

Why viruses in 3rd world pirateware?

[Simonetta]

While most of the comments about this original article are concerned with the possible presence of viruses and trojans in copied disks, no one seems to be asking the real question.
    Why would there be viruses and trojans in copied 3rd world CDs? The purpose of this renegade code is to collect passwords and account information and send it to a criminal organization that will use it to defraud the software user without their knowledge. But if someone is paying $2 for a copy of MS Office, then they don't have anything that these criminal organizations would consider worth stealing. It's only the big companies and wealthly (relative to the third world) individuals that actually do pay $500 for a piece of software that attracts the interest of the virus and trojan writers.
    The only people who would be interested in destroying the OS and data of the $2 CD buyers would be the BSA companies themselves. They would do this to discourage people from buying $2 copies of their $500 programs. If they could do this without affecting the actual program buyers, they wouldn't hesitate to do so.
    The unspoken problem here is not that someone is selling $2 copies of $500 programs, it is that the process of software development is so backward and difficult that it requires developers to charge $500 for a non-trival application. Software companies have to charge $500 and sell thousands of copies at that price in order to cover development costs. If software development, like hardware, fell in price/performance ratio cost by 50% every few years, then there wouldn't be this issue at all.

    The really good thing about having people in the 3rd world (don't like that term? K my A) making $2 copies of corporate $500 a seat programs is that it puts a ceiling on the number of copies of the program that can be sold at the high price. This forces (or will someday eventually) the software companies to invest in higher quality software development tools and techniques in order to get a greater productivity from their expensive developers. Otherwise we would be spending the rest of eternity developing code in such brain-dead 1970s nightmares like C++.

Before you challenge someone

[Rix]

Make sure you know what you're talking about. You don't need to open up the installer to splice in a trojan. You just need to infect any executable that will be run.

The "problem" of software piracy in the 3rd world

[nightfire-unique]

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.

Pirates fix virus indeed. Botnet are from elsewher

[DrYak]

The ultimate irony would be if the "pirate" version had been cleaned in such a situation...

I've actually seen it done.
There are a lot of pirate groups that try to polish their release : at least put in some cheats or trainer, in case of games, up to completly re-write the installer for some edition of pirate XP.

Never the less, viruses on the pirated CD tend to be rare (never saw any on the few I've encountered in eastern europe a few years ago).
I think the problems that TFA's author is complaining about, mainly that some developing countries are filled with zombie botnets, is not as much due to the few rare virus-containing pirate CD, as it is from :
- Microsoft trying to detect and lock out pirate versions from updates. (And thus some holes - that aren't considered as absolutely critical and auto-downloaded in background - aren't patched)
- The technical skill to control virus infection isn't as common as in countries where computers are widespread.
- When your small 32 kbits ISDN / Analog line costs a significant part of your salary, you only get on-line for very short periods of time, just enough to send your mails (and the one with advertisement for p3n1s enhancements that the trojan on your computer wrote). *You* can't afford to stay hours online to download megabytes of patches (and your machine is vulnerable), whereas, because of the distributed nature of a botnet, it's perfectly OK for the spam busyness, if only 1 or 2 mails are sent per day. When you multiply by the size of the zombie-net, the total number of mails sent in a day is enough.

And given the poor security on Windows XP, this lack of hole patching is enough to turn a huge percentage of the computer population into zombies spitting each one it's three daily mails about "ch3ap f4rm4cy m3dZZ !!!".

As TFA's autor said, only ISP are in position to help.
By filtering computers' access to the net, they can help stop zombies sending spam.
And, although it's hard to spot on Zombie from the computer it-self (it only sends a few mails per day), it's possible to spot a part of bot-net from the ISP level (if a group of 1'000 clients suddenly all send almost the same single mail, maybe they're part of a bot net. Or replying to some successful stupid chain mail).

FUD in the article.

[1u3hr]

He's talking about cd's sold on Cambodian markets. I can quite imagine one of those vendors wanting to operate a spam network on the side.

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.

Re:FUD indeed

[RockDoctor]

Just to add to all the above posts refuting the claim that pirated CDs are "infected" - I live in Russia, and I've bought plenty of those here - and not a single time there was a virus, trojan, or anything of a kind on such a CD.

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?
I saw a cartoon recently ... Mark Stanley's 'FreeFall' IIRC, that pointed out that "All humans are unique, like snowflakes with a 250 centrigrade combustion temperature."