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Piracy Built the Romanian IT Industry
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Feb 01, 2007 05:13 PM
from the eye-patches-in-europe dept.
from the eye-patches-in-europe dept.
An anonymous reader submitted a link to a Washington Post article about a very interesting press conference. Romanian President Traian Basescu stood up in front of international press and discussed the role pirated Microsoft software played in bringing about the IT industry in the country. The other big player at the press conference was Microsoft chair Bill Gates. Gates' company was opening a technical center in Bucharest, and he declined to comment on the president's remarks. Romania passed anti-piracy laws nearly 10 years ago, but nearly 70 percent of software used in the country continues to be of an illicit nature.
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Obligatory... (Score:2)
"See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor. "
No problem here...business as usual...
As the big player, Microsoft will have to contend with issue for a long, long time.
Please help wipe out piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Please help wipe out piracy (Score:5, Funny)
No argument here...
"My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love"
My onions listen for the gentle dripping of your tears.
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"Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines or political movements that envisage a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to social control."
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It's good if it entrenches a critical application or set of applications with huge numbers of people and you can somehow get future profit out of it.
But take another subset of piracy nowadays: Games. So what if tons of people play a game? You can't get money from them later on for having experienced that game. I didn't pay more for Oblivion just because I pirated Morrowind.
So piracy can be useful, and harmful.
I agree. Business software is not games. Piracy of business software, especially by home users, only serve to further entrench the software, as users may demand that software from their employers, while getting used to one game does not mean getting used to the next game too.
Re:Obligatory...Piratebay. (Score:4, Insightful)
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News Report (Score:5, Funny)
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OMFG!!!! Not the chair bombardment! Are you sure they didn't pirate 11 also? Maybe more at 12 instead.
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Re:News Report (Score:5, Funny)
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I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rampant piracy has been the norm for quite a long time in Eastern Europe & Asia.
Bill Gates most certainly knows this, but there really isn't anything he can do about it... and by opening a "global technical center" in Romania, it would seem like he is rewarding the country, regardless of their piratical ways.
Maybe it's cheap labor, maybe he sees opportunities for growth, I can't say.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, yes, but actually that almost confirms his good faith. Not cracking down on a poor country for using pirated software is actually a pretty commendable move (not saying that's his intention, but still).
Re:I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If he had released a local edition at an affordable price, that would be commendable. But he preferred to allow pirated editions to build his market share, knowing that eventually he would be able to wield the big stick of trade sanctions and the carrot of investment and convert these to legit version
Could Be the Philanthropist in Him (Score:3, Interesting)
Or maybe, just maybe, he thinks that if he does something kind towards them, they'll embrace him back and won't think of him as a faceless corporate billionaire from which it's ok to steal?
The United States economy was initially built on slavery, but I don't hold it against them because they've cleaned up their act. If you sold drugs to make enough money for rent but quit once you were on your feet in a job, I wouldn't hold i
Re:Could Be the Philanthropist in Him (Score:4, Insightful)
One ought to recall that not only was the American economy "built" on slavery but any other economy in the 18 and 19th century as well. Slavery be it the "indentured type", outright imported-people racial slavery (today's while slavery notwithstanding). All of Spain's and Portugal's colonies had massive amounts of slaves --see the the ratio of non-native people of African descent in Latin America. In addition, look at the situation as it was in Russia and India --sure the underclass weren't labelled slaves, but they were simply nominally not slaves. In practice they were and many were worse off than _some_ imported slaves in the Americas --I'm not trying to minimize the harship imported slaves went through, I'm pointing out that they were not the only ones exploited whose lives were "ruined" so-to-speak and whose lives had no outlook but stark misery and penury.
So, in the sense of lack of mobility, and liberty, and self-determination, economic viability many, many nations of today had "slave-based" economies back inthe days of yore.
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Re:I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:5, Informative)
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And not just there (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, I dunno about you guys, but at least 90 percent of the commercial software that I've used for the last 20 years has been pirated, or obtained through some other means besides paying for it. I find it hard to believe that would make me much of an oddball among the Slashdot crowd.
What's more, I concur with some of the Romanian president's comments. If it weren't for software piracy, I wouldn't have half the understanding of computers, software, and building systems out of the two, that I have today. Piracy made it possible for me to be a more valuable member of society. (I would argue that this fact is one more reason to encourage open source whenever and wherever possible.)
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Re:I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
The true issue about Romania is that there are very good engineers and they just join the European Union.
There are already a lot of IT European funded projects which are outsourced in Romania (mostly by Greek companies AFAIK).
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Re:I guess the only surprising thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Rampant piracy has been the norm in the US and elsewhere.
For example, my first PC didn't come with MS Dos, actually it didn't come with a hard drive at all. I happened to have an old MFM 15meg full height. I didn't know or understand the fact that the OS was something you had to buy. After all, in the 8bit days, DOS was something which pretty much came with the computer. In the case of Atari, the 1050 drive came with Atari DOS 3, which was 100% incompatable with everything else, so one just got a copy of Atari dos 2.0 or Atari dos 2.5 from a friend, or one was lucky enough to get 2.5 as part of their software package. Near as I'm aware, it was just something you copied, not something sold specificly by Atari except the manual which you could buy for $10.00. It wasn't until MS-dos V5.x I was even aware that it was a seperate product, with an uppgrade cost that was pretty reasonable. This ignorance was pretty normal for the time period, esp among Mac users who had the benifit of buying a system where the OS was free, and the latest version was free up until system 7.x.
Windows, average everyday people were at least aware windows was a product you could buy, but anyone who shelled out for MS-dos wasn't hip to the idea of shelling out extra for windows. Those who didn't shell out for dos typicaly didn't shell out for windows.
But regardless, piracy was part of the reason Microsoft became the standard. Other companies had to make their own OS, which did add to the cost of their machines. PCs without dos could be had for under $600 sans monitor.
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Piracy not for everyone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Piracy not for everyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many
Of course, now that there are very high quality OSS programs available there's really no need to pirate MS stuff anymore.
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Romania... (Score:5, Funny)
Bill must be quite pleased... (Score:3, Insightful)
As it is M$ have secured dependence on their software in yet another emerging market. They may have lost millions of sales in Romania in the short term but in the long term, with a
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To whom is piracy most damging? (Score:5, Insightful)
But I do not think this hurts MS too much. My reasoning is that if forced to pay for Windows, most people would spend a little more time learning to install and use Linux (it's really not that hard this days). And in the long this would result in more users proficient with Linux, and some bussinesses might also switch (not having to train employees).
So software piracy is bad, but not necessarily for the software maker.
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There might be a few companies that do; but, majority, by far, and MANY government offices, don't. Well, unless in the last year and a half since I last went there things changed RADICALLY.
Old Habits Die Hard (Score:2, Insightful)
Piracy kickstarted the US publishing industry (Score:5, Interesting)
till the time there were enough US authors whose rights needed
to be protected. When Charles Dickens visited the US, he saw his
books sold legally all over the place & he wasn't getting a penny
out of these sales. He complained to the US Govt repeatedly but
of no avail.
But publishers who were "pirating" his books in the US made
enough money to kickstart the publishing industry in the US.
Then a time came when there were enough US authors whose
rights had to be protected & that's when the relavant laws
were passed & enforced in the US.
Something similiar is happening in Romania wrt the software
industry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your analysis isn't quite right. Dickens's works were sold without his permission in the U.S., not because it was a lawless backwater, but because Dickens was a British author. It's not that there were no copyright laws. It's
Copy Rights and Wrongs (Score:4, Informative)
Take off the rose colored glasses and see how the world really works:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance, rather than vice versa, in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.
"The Americans read [Dickens}; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have?... As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing.'"
Copy Wrong [americanheritage.com]
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Piracy isn't bad... all the time (Score:3, Insightful)
In comes piracy - people from developing countries and students everywhere gets to try just about any kind of software that's sold. When they're not as poor anymore, or have influence over what software their employer should invest in, they are probably a lot more likely to have formed an opinion from their previous experience with pirated software. Personally I think this kind of piracy is 100% beneficial for both users and software companies. I suspect even Bill Gates (gasp) understands this, but is unable to say anything that might sound pro-piracy.
Of course there comes a time in the progression from poor to "wealthy" (or adequately financed) where there has to be a transition from pirated to licenced software for this to hold true. People who can afford it should always buy the non-free software they use, or else I'm in trouble as a software engineer!
"high level of technical education" ?? (Score:2, Informative)
But what the president said it's true. And you should have seen the "WTF did that dude just say" look on Billie's face.
Bill Gates 3 Piracy (Score:2)
Bill Gates most certainly knows this, but there really isn't anything he can do about it... and by opening a "global technical center" in Romania, it would seem like he is rewarding the country, regardless of their piratical ways.
It's not that there really isn't anything he can do about, it's that he might not want to. Gates/Microsoft must be smart enough to recognize their hegemony was built, in large part, by piracy. Would MS Office & Windows enjoy the same totalitarian control over the market if it had not been so easy to make (illegal) copies of the software? I doubt it. Market adoption would certainly have been much slower, allowing other alternative platforms to work their way in. We would almost certainly see a much more
In Related News... (Score:2)
Arellano Felix says drug mules built the Medellin Cartel's cocaine industry. DEA spokesmen decline to comment.
Can anyone confirm..? (Score:2)
It's Sad, Really (Score:2)
These Romanian IT professionals should be ashamed of themselves, admitting in public that they knowingly (and criminally, not that Slashdot cares) signed up for Microsoft's bullshit instead of crafting their own
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The bus mechanics, engine builders, car repair professionals, tractor operators, lightbulb replacers, farmers, and menial-wage/sex trade workers in that country should be ashamed of themselves.
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Instead of pirating MS information, with all the headaches that's sure to bring, both in dragging down Romanian computing, and in legal problems with a major multinational known for not playing well with others, why not pirate Linux information, or FreeBSD information, or any other computing information widely recoginized to be technically and legally superior to Microsoft products?
History (Score:2)
Piracy built microsoft - screw romania (Score:4, Insightful)
What they won't admit, and what would crush them completely is if they actually got rid of every pirated copy of microsoft windows in the world. If the entire country of romania never ran microsoft products, you would have an entire country of linux fans contributing to linux's evolution and coding software exclusively (or mostly) for linux platforms.
What kind of jolt would that be to Microsoft? A major one I think. But romania would have lost out as well (numbers wise), since Linux has traditionally been more complicated for new-users to use and receive support on than windows.
Metallica can afford to sue and chase-down and arrest their own fans, because after they used bootlegging of tapes to become world-famous while fans footed the bill of reproduction and distribution -- they have enough money to re-write history and say that napster is bad. How many people buy music they've never heard before? You can't sell CD's to the world by just showing off a picture of some faggy guys in tights, just like Microsoft can't possibly sell Windows to 90% of the people on earth using personal computers.
But trust me, they want to be on 90% of the computers.
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metallicas new album? [douginadress.com]
Romania not exactly unique wrt privacy (Score:2)
As opposed to 50 to 60 percent in the United States. hmmm...
Prices (Score:3, Informative)
Currently, Windows costs about 3 months of a student's scholarship, or almost a month of a beginner engineer's net income.
Why doesn't Bill buy Romania? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Only 70%?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Suckers.