In Theodore Baldwin Boothe III <
[email protected]> had this to say:
My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:
OK, let me state up front, I do NOT support piracy or theft. BUT I
really want someone to explain the following. How can a company like
microsoft be so alarmed and upset with piracy when they have nearly
$100 Billion in assets and cash on hand? Also MSFT continues to make
more and more and more money year after year even with all this Piracy
going on?
Did I miss something?
Also. Car alarms are for keeping cars from being stolen. Yet, cars get
stolen anyway, even when people install $1,000 systems. I also know
that if you have full coverage car insurance that the company will
simply write you a check for the stolen car. So why spend $1,000 on an
alarm when a common car theif can steal it? If you say it's for a
premium deduction I wonder just how much you think you saved? $1,000
wll not return too soon when your discounted premium difference is $25
per month.
Yes theft is VERY WRONG. But why do we place priority on protecting
$100 Billion corporations from losing money over some guy who owns a
corner drug store and has a 3% profit margin?
Just wondering. And btw, every time you catch the piracy or method of
transmitting pirated software, some 12 yr old kid in his closet will
code something new and better than before. Then stop that one, and
here is another 12 yr old with new program code. and so on.
Again, I do not and have never supported piracy or theft. NEVER!
Did you miss something? Perhaps the part about theft? Stealing is stealing -
regardless of the assets controlled by a company.
IDC estimated that in 2004 90 billion US Dollars worth of pirated software
was installed - in that year alone. In the study - which included 87
countries, over half of them had at least 60% of their software installed
illegally. I don't know about you but it's my opinion that $90,000,000,000
USD is a lot of money regardless of the assets owned.
I'm not sure where you see a priority being places on software piracy.
You're in a newsgroup, on a computer, with the topic being computers. The
likelihood of the conversation being about theft and that theft being
specific to software, hardware, or other computer related crimes is pretty
high, certainly much higher than seeing a conversation about thefts from a
corner drug store. I don't know if there is such a thing but maybe there's
an alt.corner.drugstore where you'd find that topic for a thread?
I do agree with the statement about the 12 year old. Sort of. However switch
the crime around. Every time you take a drug pusher off the streets another
one will replace them. And so on, and so on, and so on... Crime, simply
puts, needs to have efforts taken to prevent it and to prosecute it in order
to maintain a lawful society. While it's true that another criminal will hop
up to take the place of any who are removed from the scene that isn't
justification (in my opinion at any rate) for apathy regarding the crime or
the victims.
I can agree that to think of Microsoft as a victim is pretty tough. Maybe to
think of the humanitarian losses that this results in might help? I don't
have percentages or exact numbers but I'm willing to bet you can find a good
deal of the information specifics with a search engine. The gifting to
humanitarian efforts on behalf of the company and the philanthropic efforts
by not just this one company but any other large software corporation would
certainly be larger if they had more assets with which to make those
donations. Even if it was only 1% of that 90 billion USD that went to
humanitarian relief funds, research for cures, grants for education, etc
that's still a rather huge loss to the global community because of someone
"needing" to use a piece of software and being unwilling to pay for it.
I spend a great deal of money on software, the code I buy access to is often
something I can do without but rather I pay to support the developers. The
vast majority of what I buy is available either in the same version pretty
much for free or can be found freely distributed from another vendor. To
cite the price as a legitimate reason or the value of the company as being
pertinent or justifying the crime is not very logical to me. It seems likely
to me that with the additional assets that are lost to piracy the prices
would be lower and no one who has a "need" for (specific example) Windows XP
is unable to afford it. At worst they might have to sacrifice something else
from their life for a short time to pay for it - that's called budgeting and
being a responsible consumer - but if they truly need the software than they
certainly can afford to pay for it.
Please note that the above is much my own personal opinion and by no means
represents my views on the licensing which, in my opinion, could be
revamped.
--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)
http://dts-l.org/
"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of
existence." - Sherlock Holmes
