Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren’t the only businesses that don’t like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs. It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community. When stolen proprietary software is used by consumers, that’s a lost opportunity for open source software makers to get their own software onto the computer hard drives of new users. So says Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems for the OpenOffice.org open source project, who discussed the phenomenon here at the 10th annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention. “Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say ‘why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,’” Suarez-Potts said. Around the world, he said, many national governments are realizing that this hurts them, too, because their citizens are then consumers of stolen technology rather than active participants in open-source communities that can help people gain technology skills that benefit workforces and nations.
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About Hari Maurya
Hariprasad Maurya is a Technology writer, Web Developer & Designer when not busy with his Engineering Studies. He is a Community Champ for Mumbai IT Professional user group and always eager to help his friends and peers in whatever way he can.Follow on: Facebook | Twitter | Website
