A while back there was a big murmur going around with the news that pirate software in Sri Lanka would be banned. In the days since then it seemed that there was no major action taken and software was still being sold, albeit not with the same vigour as before.
This was good news, as paying for original software, especially the ones from Microsoft such as Windows XP and Vista as well as other packages like MS Office would be very expensive. Domestic users aside, Sri Lankan companies would suffer a severe blow as a result, having to pay costly licensing fees especially when considering the number of machines a single office may have.
While it seemed it had blown over, a recent story might indicate otherwise. It seems that a company in Dankotuwa called Tec Touch International's owners were charged in court for selling pirated software. However in this case local music producers had filed the complaint because of local products being pirated. This I can't argue against, however it goes on to indicate products belonging to the Business Software Alliance were also a part of the raid i.e. indicating foreign products.
Pirating locally produced material harms the country, so that's fair enough. However when it comes to foreign software such as MS Windows that many cannot afford, clamping down on piracy might be very harmful for both individuals and commercial entities alike. I hope this is a one off incident because of the local products being pirated, because if it isn't, it's very bad news indeed for a lot of people.
Time to promote FOSS to the masses...
ReplyDeletetrue but i thing we should look forward to open source technologies and somewhere between the copyright free and all copyrights reserved states if we are going ahead with the intellectual property act or some other legislature to ban the circulation of pirated softwares
ReplyDeleteTrue that. but can we have double standards like that? i mean, piracy is piracy and software is software. but ur dead right when you say that clamping down on piracy will stunt the tech development of our country. big firms are not losing due to piracy much over here anyways, its not like your average in house programming geek is gonna dish out thousands of bucks for a windows CD. we should go open source maybe?
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with you. I don't think MS really cares much about the market here. If they clamp down on illegal Windows, it would only cause people to move to something like Linux. So they're better off letting everyone play with Windows till the economy matures (if ever).
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with you. I don't think MS really cares much about the market here. If they clamp down on illegal Windows, it would only cause people to move to something like Linux. So they're better off letting everyone play with Windows till the economy matures (if ever).
ReplyDeletewell, i hate when they pirate stuff like movies and soft ware-a disaster for ANY marketer.. but then again there's too many pros for a poor country like ours to completely ban it..
ReplyDelete@ Annoymous: True dat! I'm always behind Open Source!
ReplyDelete@ DRG: Going open source frees us from a lot of things. It's to me one of the best examples of power to the people, but actually from the people.
@ Whackster: I know it's a bit of a double standard, but in reality can we afford to take high and mighty standards all the time?
@ Dinu: I think MS is just milking the market for all it's worth, since it's not likely to ever expand. Corporations are always concerned with never ending growth... so more cash by any means.
@ Horton: Exactly.