Slashdot Mirror
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."
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".
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.
Open-source trojans.
Can somebody point me to the repository so I can include them in my projects?
liqbase
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
http://ascending.wordpress.com/
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
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).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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?
I saw a cartoon recently
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"