Can piracy boost IT development?
Can piracy boost IT development?
According to Romania's president, Traian Băsescu,
piracy rocks:
"Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," he said.
I'm not a big supporter of companies using their dominant position on
the market to sell overpriced software, but I couldn't swallow the
glorification of piracy either. For me it's the same like Vaclav
Klaus, president of Czech Republic, saying:
"Car burglars, stealing cars in Germany, helped Czech economy to keep up with increased demand in transportation."
I wonder what these young IT experts in Romania would say, if their product is pirated. Would they mind?
But is there a way, how to get out from the too_expensive->can't_afford_it->let's_steal_it mindset? Sure, open source.
Why someone would bother to steal MS Office, if
openoffice offers comparable solution? Do you need a webserver or application server, try Tomcat,
Glassfish or other open source servers. Do I have to mention
opensolaris or linux as an alternative OS?
So here is my message to it_guys@romania:
Consider opensource alternative first!
And here is another one to companies that are still affected so much by piracy:
Don't worry about piracy, start sharing!
Posted at
11:12AM Mar 15, 2007
by Pavel Suk in Open Source |
Posted by Madhan on March 15, 2007 at 01:39 PM CET #
On one hand, Băsescu is wrong: it was IBM, SUN and Cisco that came with training programs and hardware and helped the Romanian IT make the transition from the big iron-centered infrastructure of the late '80 to the PC centered infrastructure. Microsoft and illegal copies of Microsoft products helped only create brain dead office workers and gamers.
On the other hand, our president is quite known for successfully provoking people say stupid things, and Gates deserves congratulations for keeping cool: by that time he already knew that the Romanian administration is using OpenOffice on most computers.
Posted by Emil Per. on March 16, 2007 at 10:07 AM CET #
Posted by Pavel Suk on March 16, 2007 at 10:29 AM CET #
Posted by Conficio on March 16, 2007 at 06:52 PM CET #