An article appeared recently on HeHe.net by author Ian McLean (no, not the actor) that discussed how piracy hurts Open Source!  The article itself takes several similar ideas I presented in an earlier article of my own and discusses them from a slightly different perspective.  IE, how piracy hurts the FOSS community.

And since his discussion is both important, and enhances some of my own ideas in some very nice ways, I wanted to write up this article as a nod towards him for covering this important subject.  Piracy is bad, regardless which way you slice it.  Sure, some have justified it in the movie and music industries as a way to hurt the media giants in tangible ways that force them to make changes they otherwise would not make, or otherwise did not want to.  But software piracy is another story entirely.  

There are a lot of man hours that go into writing software.  There's also the aspect that, aside from the monetary loss from piracy that occurs, there's other things that are lost.  Such as market share for one.  While some people might think that market share isn't important, it really is.  He who is king makes the rules.  We've already seen that with Microsoft's utter dominance of the desktop market, Cisco's relative dominance (not so much now, but certainly at one time) of the network market, and even Oracle's dominance of the database market.  Market share matters.

Now it doesn't necessarily matter in the ways that we typically think it does, but it still matters, and piracy affects that.  As I mentioned in my article, if a piece of software has 1000 users, 90% of which use pirated copies, it doesn't matter that the company only got 10% of the sales it should have.  It's still got 1000 users.  That ultimately leads to a market share advantage that allows the developing company to put sway over the market in ways that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

Case in point, again originally drawn from my article.  Microsoft Office became the industry standard office suite, not because it was better, since there were plenty of other office suites out there that were far superior, but rather because it was the most pirated.  That meant that more people used it, and thus they demanded that others use it for compatibility, ultimately creating even more market share.  Windows, Outlook and other programs like them did the same thing.  Piracy gave Microsoft power.

And oddly enough, in the beginning they welcomed piracy (not openly, but certainly behind closed doors as was evidenced by several internal memos now made public) as they knew it would ultimately help their bottom line by increasing the amount of users using Office.  The more users, the more power they gained, and the bigger they became.  Eventually it became such that you couldn't go without Microsoft Office at home or work.  It was only then that they started really truly cracking down on piracy and trying to make that few extra bucks by converting former pirates to legitimate users.

So if piracy helps proprietary software so much, why does it hurt Open Source?  The simple answer is, people have been brainwashed to believe that paid software is superior to free software.  With that mentality in hand, they're more likely to pirate a paid version than use a free version.  It's like the $20 ring vs the $200 ring.  Both are the same, but one costs more, and ultimately it's the one that costs more that gets sold first.  There's also the element of "perceived value".  This is a condition where a product's actual worth is artificially inflated simply by increasing the cost required to purchase it.

So in the end, the fight against piracy is not just the domain of the proprietary software companies.  It should be our fight as well.  Because if piracy is stopped, people will loose that easy out of pirating software, thus they will be forced to either pay for the software, or go with FOSS.  If they're too cheap to buy it, they'll go FOSS.  If they're not too cheap, FOSS is still an alternative that provides a great product at the right price.

There's also nearly zero worry about viruses, spyware, or other undesirable additions to your system that might come with pirated software.  Anytime you pirate something, you risk destroying your system, your privacy, and even your financial resources.  It's becoming harder and harder to detect viruses, Trojans and the like these days, and many come in through pirated software.  So if pirated free vs Open Source free are on equal ground with pirates, then malware free and risk free immediately give FOSS the advantage in any argument.

Either way, we all need to work on stopping piracy of all forms.  It does nothing to help FOSS, and is doing everything to hurt it.  If we truly want FOSS to grow and succeed, this is yet another hurtle we need to overcome in order to help it grow.  So do the world a favor and stop a pirate today.