Sure this is a bile filled screed, but based on my observations there is a lot of truth to it.
There are indeed a lot of truth in there, though it is quite gloomy indeed.
The Sun parts has some truth, but I need to do more research for me to say it is all true, and this is certainly not the place to debate many of thses.
Of course it is sick, NO ONE writes software for free. This is the big lie of open source.
Indeed, though it is not a complete lie, you are right that many open source programmers work at companies like OSDL and Red Hat.
The worst thing a business can have is someone else’s source code, they want a product that works and support that goes with it.
Yep, that is what Red Hat’s, SUSE’s and Cygnus’s business model depends on.
Without it, open source would never have been so successful.
The Sun desktop is pathetic, even for free.
Which era? Because I know about Sun OpenDesktop, CDE and other failed attempts at a Unix desktop.
Sun after 25 years has nothing to show for its effort but carnage.
Sun nearly wrecked the mainframe business, did wreck the Vax business
These statement looks contradictory.
I pirated as a child and I continue to pirate as an adult, even though I make scads of money. Most software is poor and overpriced. BUT I do purchase, rarely, iff (if and only if):
- I have no other choice and the price is reasonable, or
- The software is great, the price is reasonable, there’s a benefit to buying over pirating (such as updates), the developers seem great, the purchase process is easy, and I can pay them without a middleman getting a big chunk of it.
Those are a lot of criteria to meet, and that’s the only way I’ll pay. When I create software, I try to making it something that EVEN I would buy.
You people should read some of the older virus phreaking magazines. There’s a guy that wrote a C compiler that he then compiled a virus with. At runtime it decrypted one routine, called it, re-encrypted the routine at the return address, hashing the key with instructions interspersed with the real instructions of the routine before calling another routine.
Cracking a program that encrypts itself like that will take years. If the actual code of your program is encrypted on disk with changing keys, and there is never the full program decrypted in memory, you will be safe for weeks at the very least.
Also this sort of thing is exactly what TPM makes possible for unencrypted programs. Making a program that cannot - in any way - be started without contacting the home base first.
If you’re going to include a protection then put some effort in it or if you buy the protection then include penalty terms if it breaks too soon.
When I buy protected software then find out it was already cracked (few days after release) I feel cheated because I paid money for something that didn’t work! I should get some money back for paying for broken copy protection with the product, especially if the protection was from 3rd party protection company. There should be some kind of money back guarantee from the protection company that if their protection breaks in less than say 2 months then there’s a penalty.
On the other hand, while protections can be made to last much longer (made infeasible to crack) if that only leads to further resrictions to buyers such as recently with game DRM with all kinds of limitations and possibly loss of ability to sell it used, then that’s taking freedom away from legit user and such business should not be supported (EA).
So keep in mind, DRM licensing = BAD and different from normal copy protection, which can work but very few have even tried to implement properly.
It is true that we will never stop software piracy 100% but does that
mean we should give up.I agree that some people who use pirated software would never pay for it in first place.They will find it on private FTPs. On the other hand someone who is looking for cracked version and can not find it easily could end up buying legal copy.That is even more true for small companies in need of software for their business.So, if link to your cracked software is in google search results You should do something about that.In my opinion, that translates to real lost profit.
Sam Begic
www.dasintelligence.com
Internet monitoring and enforcement
You wouldn’t steal a lawnmower from the John Deere dealership when you need to mow your lawn, would you?
Depends. Does the dealership have a magical lawnmower-copying machine that can produce an infinite number of lawnmowers at zero cost? No? Then I guess I wouldn’t.
Folks, comparing copyright infringement to theft will only convince the people who are too stupid to see the difference between physical property (where every copy has its own materials and production cost) and information (where every copy after the first is basically free for everyone involved). You aren’t that stupid yourselves; why do you want to treat your potential customers like they are?
Piracy is only a problem if you’re stuck in the mindset of selling software like a mass-produced consumer good. But that’s not what software is. The proper price for a copy is approximately zero, since that’s what it costs to make a copy.
The proper place to collect your money is up front: demand to get paid for the service of writing the software in the first place. If all the programmers of the world banded together and said nuh-uh, we’re not writing another line of code until you give us some money, they’d get it, because the demand is there for their services.
Do that and the business model will follow. When you start thinking about the infrastructure you’d need to support a business model where programmers (or musicians, or anyone else whose product is information) are paid up front, it might sound a little overwhelming: you need some way to bring producers and consumers together, coordinate payments and reputations, resolve disputes when the finished product isn’t what people thought they were paying for, etc. But really, it’s no less reasonable than the infrastructure we already have for today’s business model: in the grand scheme of things, isn’t it already pretty ridiculous to spend $millions on a way for a program to know whether it’s running from a hard drive or a CD-ROM?
I myself am an offender of this crime.
I don’t have a lot of spendable income and therefore cannot buy every game I want to try, I will usually download a game to see how I like it, now these aren’t games that I would buy if I had the money, but games I think I might like.
If I do end up liking it, I will buy it (finances allowing). It surprised me when you used World of Goo as the example because it is a game I couldn’t get locally. I illegally pirated it, finished it and loved it. I only recently got a Mastercard. And with it I bought World of Goo off Steam.
I have downloaded and installed this copy legal copy, but I haven’t run it once.
I won’t pirate games I KNOW will be good (I will get some liking out of), right now I have a Collectors Edition of Dawn of War 2 reserved locally, and am waiting for the Starcraft 2 release date to be announced so I can get a Collectors of it.
Point is I would have never bought Portal or World of Goo without pirating them first. However, as I get older I hope to have a bigger income, and more to spend on programmers, something I wish to be day.
I live in Australia and new games are ~$100 here, Australia also (evidently) has one of the lowest software piracy rates in the world. I don’t get why we pay double to triple what Americans pay (during exchange rates variances) and we don’t pirate games as much, why our new game prices haven’t fallen. You do good by you, We do good by you?
Though through 2008 there have been some notable exceptions, Spore was released (at least at one store locally) at $80 and so have some others.
Jesse on January 14, 2009 05:38 PM:
Folks, comparing copyright infringement to theft will only convince
the people who are too stupid to see the difference between
physical property (where every copy has its own materials and
production cost) and information (where every copy after the first
is basically free for everyone involved). You aren’t that stupid
yourselves; why do you want to treat your potential customers like
they are?
So the first customer pays $1 million and the rest get it free? Who gets to be first?
Regis on January 7, 2009 11:36 AM:
I pirated as a child and I continue to pirate as an adult, even
though I make scads of money. Most software is poor and overpriced.
I saw an empty house the other day that was priced at $200000. But it wasn’t good enough for the price, so I’m just squatting instead. The fruit at the supermarket looked a little bruised, so I put it in my pocket instead of the shopping cart. I looked inside a book at the bookstore, but I didn’t think it was very good, so I stole it.
Shall I go on?
The proper place to collect your money is up front: demand to get paid for the service of writing the software in the first place. If all the programmers of the world banded together and said nuh-uh, we’re not writing another line of code until you give us some money, they’d get it, because the demand is there for their services.
Do that and the business model will follow.
Yep, that kind of business model is already very common. Consultants commonly use this business model.
Way too many torrents offering Wiiware World Of Goo lately. It’s like offer me a different game for Christ’s sake!!
I like many other posters believe that there has to be some kind of middle ground between software makers and users. For example, when I first got on the Internet in '99, all the programs and files I downloaded came in zip format. Obviously, Windows 98 didn’t have a built in zip utility. Also, FLOSS wasn’t as available for Windows-based systems as it is now. So, like many users, I downloaded WinZip, used it for a while, then finally got tired of the nagging messages about it’s usage, so I went online, found a serial and started my new life as a software pirate. Later on, it became games that were no longer available, little utilities for playing those games, and later on when I got an iMac, Surfer’s Serials and pirated copies of Photoshop 5.0.
When I started having money, piracy became something I wanted to avoid. But software makers started creating activation schemes. This led me to hunting down cracks for activation for software I legally purchased.
Windows XP was awesome, and worth the purchase, but the activation and genuine advantage became a problems since I was constantly reinstalling my OS (every few months). After Microsoft stopped activation over the phone, I went back to pirating software, getting my hands on a volume license and CD.
I rarely pirated music because I always thought about the artists quitting, and also because I saw a CD as an archive where I could rip my MP3s that I controlled the quality of the rips.
Nowadays, even at 6 - 12 Mbps Internet, torrenting modern games isn’t worth the time and effort it takes to acquire/crack/patch/repeat as it does to pay 20 bucks for the game, with the DVD and the state of mind that comes with a non pirated title (no rootkits, botnet apps, trojans, etc.)
Good software will always have a loyal following. Bad software… not so much.
If games are the only software products consumers will buy themselves, and 90% of games are pirated, then it is hard to create your business around consumers.
On the other hand, corporate software means active selling by salesmen, unless the items are small, something like under 1000$. What do you have there? Google adwords, the Microsoft tax, and niche monopolies like Photoshop.
I would say that things would be much better if consumers bought more software directly, and the same goes to other intellectual property. But this is unlikely to happen in the near future, until all software is web-dependent and controllable.
Would you rather have 90% of the copies of your game be pirated, and sell the other 10%; or have 0% piracy, and nobody buying it either?
What a dumb argument. This is what’s known as a false dichotomy. So, tell me, NM, would you rather have your car stolen, or have your car stolen, your house burned down, and be sodomized? See? You should be happy that only your car was stolen. A false dichotomy is setting up two situations and pretending that they’re the only two options.
I would say that things would be much better if consumers bought more software directly, and the same goes to other intellectual property. But this is unlikely to happen in the near future, until all software is web-dependent and controllable.
Well it seems there’s two clear sides to this saga.
On the one hand we have the die hard software capitalists fresh from their Sony records DRM spat with the likes of George Michael and Prince, err, sorry, ‘Symbol’. Who with their rather limited grasp of software that could be described as flacid at best, demand we all use rather archaic copy prevention and DRM systems requiring instant software activation with unwieldy long License Keys or flimsy dongles.
Then on the other there are the anti capitalists who, when they’re not breaking shop windows at G2/7/20 etc meetings, are demanding that all software is free and no one should have to pay for it, just that they don’t want to be the ones to develop the stuff as they’re too busy hugging trees when they’re not throwing bricks.
Of course we can’t make software free, or rely on people paying what they think may be fair for it, as nobody would want to be the sap who pays up for what would be some rather poor quality and under funded bundle of bugs. At the same time we shouldn’t have to suffer crappy DRM with dongles or license keys as long as your arm.
OK. enough’s enough. What we have here is a great opportunity. Now we have the technology to let people have a decent trial period of a software title before they buy, and not have a bunch of hoops to jump through should they want it. Software that uses a FRIENDLY DRM service offering free trials and easy activation can be distributed at a fraction of the cost, ensuring everyone pays and that all that cash goes into improving it.
It seems clear to me that friendly DRM with free trials is the only way forward, and that any software company choosing otherwise is doomed to failure. There is already one use friendly DRM service out there (www.fingoo.net) and I’m sure there will be plenty more to follow. So lets all put down our bricks and our legal binders and relax knowing that eventually time and technology will save the day. And a few savvy users voting with our feet of course :oD
tanks you
Yeah, sites like www.zoomtorrents.com?file=Visual_Studio_2008-Developer-Edition.tar.gz make it easy to get stuff without paying for it.
You make my point for me: Since these concepts don’t map well to the concept of property, we only confuse and confound rational discussion if we cling to terms with entirely irrelevant baggage.
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