451 CAOS Theory 
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On open source and piracy
Matthew Aslett, July 25, 2008 @ 9:12 am ETDana Blankenhorn asks whether open source is hurt by piracy, prompted by comments made by Louis Suarez-Potts, Sun’s community manager for OpenOffice.org at OSCON.
Dana is unconvinced that open source supporters should necessarily be doing anything about piracy, noting that “There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?”
He also notes that “On the other hand if we helped Oracle enforce its license terms we might accelerate the move to MySQL and Ingres.”
However, one need only remember these comments from last year made by the president of Microsoft’s business division, Jeff Raikes, to understand why piracy is bad for open source:
“Our number one goal is that we want people to use our product. If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else. And that’s because we understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the install base of people who are using our products.
What you hope to do is over time you hope to convert them to licensing the software, legally licensing it, so on, and so forth,” he added, neatly – and presumably accidentally – describing the method by which commercial open source vendors benefit by making their core code available free of charge.
So it’s always a delicate balance, because what you want to do is you want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don’t want to push so hard that you lose the asset that’s most fundamental in the business.”
Additionally on our recent virtual tour of Europe we saw how piracy was seen as a barrier to further adoption of open source in countries like Greece and Romania.
Supported by government, open source can be used as a tool defeat piracy. Louis explained, ComputerWorld reports that: “By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity — as well as job growth and richer economies — through open-source development.”
An example of this is Russia, where Microsoft’s bungled attempt to crack down on software piracy resulted in a decision by the government to reduce piracy and encourage local business by encouraging the use of open source software.
Comments (5) Categories: Licensing,Software
Piracy means the attack on ships (and such things).
It’s better not to repeat Hollywood’s daemonisation propaganda terms.
Hi Matthew,
I believe that any open source software, and probably openoffice.org more than others, should compete with proprietary software only on a merit-basis. Of course merits include matching users’ technical requirements, but also many other important aspects regarding the durability of the software, the type of community, the support level available, and so on. Still we can stress that open source is legal, as I did about 4 years ago writing the Italian OpenOffice.org slogan “Vola e fai volare con i gabbiani di OpenOffice.org: usalo, copialo e regalalo, è legale!”(eng: Let’s fly with OpenOffice.org’s seagulls: use it, copy it and make it a present, it is legal!)
So said, I believe we should concern much more about “open source piracy”.
We ran a campaign on becoming legal using openoffice.org. We also believe that piracy hurt open source in the angle of many people don’t accept open source because they already getting proprietary products for free.
Stressing that OOo is legal is a good thing, and by the way we did it years before the get legal campaign.
So said we can definitely not blame people because they use proprietary products illegally (and not for free, as you wrote). Marketing OOo saying that is free AND legal is smart, arguing that they are noy using OOo because they get proprietary products for free (illegally) is a pretty weird marketing idea.
A very damaging form of open source piracy is when IT vendors bundle open source components into larger tool sets, fail to acknowledge usage of said open source – but just pass it off as part of their proprietary platform / product line. Whether or not they are in direct violation of whatever the particular governing open source license might be – this is a problem that deserves more attention. Obviously when this happens it is particularly frustrating to any “commercial open source” vendor (that the original creator of the open source may have founded) from a financial perspective. But it’s also crippling to the documentation. Use cases, bug reporting and other critical feedback / signals that would have gone back to the open source project are diverted instead to the pirating IT vendor, as they profit from those new “services” upsell opportunities, while at the same time NOT passing along the feedback to the original open source project (that’s fundamental to evolving the feature sets, etc.). I think it’s pretty disgusting how blatantly IT vendors cherry pick revenue opportunities from someone else’s open source install base – showing up at conferences to hawk potential customers (as opposed to helping the community), paying lip services to contributions they’ve made (that are often very superficial efforts at best), take advantage of the message groups and other developer resources of said open source project – yet rarely give any sort of meaningful financial resources, use case data or ANYTHING of value back. There are too many vendors out there that are toeing the line and in legal compliance with open source licenses – but the spirit of what they are doing (or NOT doing) to reciprocate is way off base.