Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Security, Commercial, Open Source
Does software piracy hurt the open source community?
Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including the open source community since pirated software theoretically takes "customers" away from open source projects. For example, a college student may never end up downloading Open Office since he copied Microsoft Office from a friend, but that's not to say it hurts the money-makers like Microsoft at all. A little bit of piracy helps to establish big company's products as "the standard", hurting open source projects even more and making it harder for them to get their foot into a user's door.
Now we'd like to pose a question: Like the college student used in the example above, does pirating software generally prevent you from trying Open Source software or would you have put the cash down anyway even if you couldn't get it for free?





So let's just say,
hypothetically, that your copy of Windows XP isn't "genuine." If you're tired of seeing the warning that
alerts you to this fact, there's now a
After spending the better part of an hour on 