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This is just a copy and paste operation of something I just threw into the Rants section on the main site...but here:
Well, damn it. If I'm here, you know I'm pissed...heh.
I was reading some article about software companies, including Microsoft, pushing really hard to smash software piracy...apparently they'd thrown a few guys in prison (members of a cracking group who released Windows 95 two weeks before its scheduled release, and had several other feats under their belts, heh) for releasing something or other for free, when it wasn't supposed to be. Well, I can't really complain much about that, since it IS technically theft - not that I feel for MS or anything, heh.
They started going into detail about the moral (and mostly theoretical) ramifications of such acts...and I started to wish I had some platform to bitch and moan from...then I mumbled something like, "Oh yeah...the Rants section..." Heh. Anyway...
From their standpoint, companies like Microsoft create software because they know it will make them money, and lots of it. Without that incentive, they'd never really create anything, and nothing would get done. So the more their profits are hurt, the more the consumer is hurt, since less software will be produced. I beg to differ, on a few important points.
First off, when something-or-other hasn't been created by some monster software company, and there's demand for it, what happens? Well, some guy, or girl (or group of either, or both, heh) get together (unless it's just a guy or a girl, in which case that wouldn't make sense...heheh, OK, OK, back to it) and make that special, in-demand something-or-other, and release it for free. Then there's no need for it to be created later, and generally it isn't. Sometimes it is anyway, and since it has the MS logo and name, or whatever other company's stamp of approval, maybe some sheep will buy it, but bleh, that's another subject, for later.
When something's already been created, there's no real reason for someone to spend the little spare time they have (or the abundance of spare time, if applicable) to create a piece of software for which there's not much demand...there's no incentive. However, when a certain piece of software is really the only one of its kind on the market, and it's prohibitively expensive, there IS an incentive...this is apparent in the case of PhotoShop (retailing at over $1000 with plugins) and its freeware counterpart The GIMP (hailed by many as a far better editor and creator), and Microsoft Office (retailing at between $300 and $400, before add-ons) and its freeware counterpart OpenOffice (loved by many, heh...OpenOffice rocks, though these days I find little use for an office suite...friends of mine cherish this, and I know of businesses that use it exclusively).
Even the Linux operating system distributions are getting quite attractive (I personally really like SuSE), and despite some software compatibility issues (which are becoming negligible with the introduction of OS's that can launch Windows executables, and the fact that pretty much everything freeware is showing up in an optimized Linux form), the use of Linux as a primary OS is on the rise, massively. Imagine if someone made an operating system that picked up hardware and networking systems five times as quickly and efficiently as Windows did, with no hangups. Imagine an OS that, for every hundred times Windows crashed, it did 0 times. Imagine if there was an operating system that had many, many versions, so you could choose which style suited you, and each was free and came with as much free software as you could carry with two hands. Well...it's Linux, and it's starting to really kick @$$...and so is Mozilla Firefox, which pretty much dominates on Internet Explorer, especially for auto-configuring network connections...try it out sometime.
Here's the sequence of events that occurs in this, our new age: Mary wishes she had a program that would emulate a little lamb on her desktop. So she calls around to her friends, surfs the web, runs a few Google searches, and finds out if someone's already made something to her liking, or no one has. If it exists, it's either freeware, shareware, adware, or something she just flat out needs to buy to use. If it's freeware, she finds it, downloads it, uses it, and is happy. If it's shareware, she plays with it for a few days, then needs to buy it. If it's adware, she plays with it for a few minutes, then needs to get those damn banners to go away. So she accepts the fact that she needs the full version. She does some quick homework...how expensive is it? Would it be worth the effort to look for an alternative to actually dishing out cash? How easy would it be to find a serial, a crack, a precracked version, or even make a snapshot of the registry and monitor what changes are made after installation, or break out her copy of My First Little Book of Dissassembly and do the damn cracking herself? If it costs five bucks, she probably just buys it. If it costs twenty, she considers other avenues, and maybe even looks into them a little. If it's anything more, she goes to work, and short of the scene meeting its match in anti-piracy technology, she gets what she's looking for.
I help run a PC repair shop for Circuit City, for some spare cash. When I see a PC that needs antivirus removal, do I use Norton AntiVirus, or McAfee? Do I use Panda's Titanium, or PC-Cillin? No. I use AntiVir, AVG, and BitDefender, sequentially or concurrently. I do this because they're the best...and they're also free for private use. I benchmark antivirus scanners against each other all the time, after putting together a vault of thirty or so old and new viruses, trojans, and the like. McAfee scores the lowest every time, followed by Norton. PC-Cillin is next, and finally Titanium is my favorite purchaseable AV software (though Nod32 is getting close to it). None of these measure up to either AntiVir, AVG, or BitDefender. On my home computer, I run these three in tandem, and they still eat less RAM and CPU time than Norton alone...pretty much every piece of AV software on the market is a resource hog with more useless eye candy than should be allowed, and DOESN'T EVEN PROVIDE GOOD PROTECTION.
But why, you ask, do these companies dominate the market? Because Joe Schmoe has HEARD of them. His neighbors all have Norton, and it's on TV, and the internet, and he can buy it at WalMart, and it comes with half the computers on the shelves...the average guy or gal automatically thinks, "Hell...if it's a big company, there's no way they'd be allowed to put out bad software...". Sorry, but that's just not the case today. A friend of mine told me she just bought a laptop two weeks before, and bought a $59.99 copy of Norton's Internet Security Suite with it. When I recommend she run one of the freeware antivirus scanners I use in the shop to remove viral infections from PC's that already have Norton installed, she said she obviously didn't need it, and Norton was doing just fine, since she hadn't been infected yet. Without even mentioning the fact that it's quite likely she's already running a trojan or two in the background (about 90% of PC's are infected in one way or another...about the same amount that either use Norton, McAfee, or nothing at all, heh), that's like jumping from the roof of a giant building, and noting ten stories down, "So far, so good.". Eh.
The same goes for antispyware progs...I don't use SpySweeper, or any other piece of garbage thrown out by some over-educated, under-intelligent, ultimately unknowledgeable suit posing as an expert. I use Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition, HiJackThis, ASquared HiJackFree, plain ol' RegEdit, and a few specialized tools here and there, all of which are FREE. And what do I find on the average computer...? Everything SpySweeper obviously didn't, which is about 75% of spyware and adware infestations, and anything made in the last two years or so...and suddenly their PC, which the makers of their protection software told them was experiencing hardware problems that couldn't be fixed, is now a rocketship, just like it was when they bought it for half the cost of all the software they bought with it. The guys at these companies must just sit on their hands, because it just doesn't matter what quality the product is that they put out...people will buy it because that's what they've heard to buy from Auntie Susan, or their friend the computer guru who, rumors tell, built his own computer once, with only a manual, all the necessary components, and a few phonecalls to tech support.
Just like Kleenex, things like Norton Antivirus and Microsoft Windows have become the icon for products of their kind, and that seems to be all it takes for Mr. Schmoe and his wife to look no further, and question not the company that made their flawless software when it suddenly exhibits flaws.
A hacker named The Mentor (Lloyd Blankenship, I believe) once said, "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals." I'm not saying this founding member of the Legion of Doom was without fault...you can no more excuse away exploration of an unwilling administrator's servers than you can trespassing on private property. But he provides an interesting point. Another way to say it would be...he's right.
If companies like Microsoft and Symantec (parent company of Norton) decided it wasn't worth their monetary while to create software, someone else would, because there's a need for it. Not only that, but since they're not getting paid for it, not one of the people creating, or helping create this software would sit on his or her ass, pretending to work, or leech money out of the group in a useless job position...both things that occur en mass in large corporations like the ones I'm ranting so fervently about...simply because the kind of people that go out of their way to provide a free piece of software aren't in it for the money...and aren't lazy. They're either in it for recognition, good programming practice, something to do, or just because they want to help out.
So what really happens when people pirate software? Competition. There's no impetus for people like Bill Gates to make his company try harder...he has so little competition, it doesn't really matter what he does, or more importantly, doesn't do. But when people can download a copy of Windows XP Home Edition in a few hours, rather than paying $199 for it, MS scrambles to improve their anti-piracy methods, and eventually drops their prices a bit. And if they can't keep up any more, and move out of the market altogether, someone else comes and either makes a cheaper, better product, or a free, better product, and continues to improve upon it. It's called economics. Did everyone forget? But now, now, I know...it's still theft. I never said I condone it. I just don't mind that it's shaking up those cash mongers' artificially elevated lives a little. After all...fuck'em. Heh.
I don't blame MS, or Symantec, or any of the other companies I've mentioned with an ill tone. They beat the system, and managed to sell air at inflated prices...good for them. But now they ARE the system, and that can't be allowed. Keep supporting open-source, and if someone comes out with tissue twice the quality and half the price of Kleenex called Tissue Number Five, give it a try. Out.
Well, damn it. If I'm here, you know I'm pissed...heh.
I was reading some article about software companies, including Microsoft, pushing really hard to smash software piracy...apparently they'd thrown a few guys in prison (members of a cracking group who released Windows 95 two weeks before its scheduled release, and had several other feats under their belts, heh) for releasing something or other for free, when it wasn't supposed to be. Well, I can't really complain much about that, since it IS technically theft - not that I feel for MS or anything, heh.
They started going into detail about the moral (and mostly theoretical) ramifications of such acts...and I started to wish I had some platform to bitch and moan from...then I mumbled something like, "Oh yeah...the Rants section..." Heh. Anyway...
From their standpoint, companies like Microsoft create software because they know it will make them money, and lots of it. Without that incentive, they'd never really create anything, and nothing would get done. So the more their profits are hurt, the more the consumer is hurt, since less software will be produced. I beg to differ, on a few important points.
First off, when something-or-other hasn't been created by some monster software company, and there's demand for it, what happens? Well, some guy, or girl (or group of either, or both, heh) get together (unless it's just a guy or a girl, in which case that wouldn't make sense...heheh, OK, OK, back to it) and make that special, in-demand something-or-other, and release it for free. Then there's no need for it to be created later, and generally it isn't. Sometimes it is anyway, and since it has the MS logo and name, or whatever other company's stamp of approval, maybe some sheep will buy it, but bleh, that's another subject, for later.
When something's already been created, there's no real reason for someone to spend the little spare time they have (or the abundance of spare time, if applicable) to create a piece of software for which there's not much demand...there's no incentive. However, when a certain piece of software is really the only one of its kind on the market, and it's prohibitively expensive, there IS an incentive...this is apparent in the case of PhotoShop (retailing at over $1000 with plugins) and its freeware counterpart The GIMP (hailed by many as a far better editor and creator), and Microsoft Office (retailing at between $300 and $400, before add-ons) and its freeware counterpart OpenOffice (loved by many, heh...OpenOffice rocks, though these days I find little use for an office suite...friends of mine cherish this, and I know of businesses that use it exclusively).
Even the Linux operating system distributions are getting quite attractive (I personally really like SuSE), and despite some software compatibility issues (which are becoming negligible with the introduction of OS's that can launch Windows executables, and the fact that pretty much everything freeware is showing up in an optimized Linux form), the use of Linux as a primary OS is on the rise, massively. Imagine if someone made an operating system that picked up hardware and networking systems five times as quickly and efficiently as Windows did, with no hangups. Imagine an OS that, for every hundred times Windows crashed, it did 0 times. Imagine if there was an operating system that had many, many versions, so you could choose which style suited you, and each was free and came with as much free software as you could carry with two hands. Well...it's Linux, and it's starting to really kick @$$...and so is Mozilla Firefox, which pretty much dominates on Internet Explorer, especially for auto-configuring network connections...try it out sometime.
Here's the sequence of events that occurs in this, our new age: Mary wishes she had a program that would emulate a little lamb on her desktop. So she calls around to her friends, surfs the web, runs a few Google searches, and finds out if someone's already made something to her liking, or no one has. If it exists, it's either freeware, shareware, adware, or something she just flat out needs to buy to use. If it's freeware, she finds it, downloads it, uses it, and is happy. If it's shareware, she plays with it for a few days, then needs to buy it. If it's adware, she plays with it for a few minutes, then needs to get those damn banners to go away. So she accepts the fact that she needs the full version. She does some quick homework...how expensive is it? Would it be worth the effort to look for an alternative to actually dishing out cash? How easy would it be to find a serial, a crack, a precracked version, or even make a snapshot of the registry and monitor what changes are made after installation, or break out her copy of My First Little Book of Dissassembly and do the damn cracking herself? If it costs five bucks, she probably just buys it. If it costs twenty, she considers other avenues, and maybe even looks into them a little. If it's anything more, she goes to work, and short of the scene meeting its match in anti-piracy technology, she gets what she's looking for.
I help run a PC repair shop for Circuit City, for some spare cash. When I see a PC that needs antivirus removal, do I use Norton AntiVirus, or McAfee? Do I use Panda's Titanium, or PC-Cillin? No. I use AntiVir, AVG, and BitDefender, sequentially or concurrently. I do this because they're the best...and they're also free for private use. I benchmark antivirus scanners against each other all the time, after putting together a vault of thirty or so old and new viruses, trojans, and the like. McAfee scores the lowest every time, followed by Norton. PC-Cillin is next, and finally Titanium is my favorite purchaseable AV software (though Nod32 is getting close to it). None of these measure up to either AntiVir, AVG, or BitDefender. On my home computer, I run these three in tandem, and they still eat less RAM and CPU time than Norton alone...pretty much every piece of AV software on the market is a resource hog with more useless eye candy than should be allowed, and DOESN'T EVEN PROVIDE GOOD PROTECTION.
But why, you ask, do these companies dominate the market? Because Joe Schmoe has HEARD of them. His neighbors all have Norton, and it's on TV, and the internet, and he can buy it at WalMart, and it comes with half the computers on the shelves...the average guy or gal automatically thinks, "Hell...if it's a big company, there's no way they'd be allowed to put out bad software...". Sorry, but that's just not the case today. A friend of mine told me she just bought a laptop two weeks before, and bought a $59.99 copy of Norton's Internet Security Suite with it. When I recommend she run one of the freeware antivirus scanners I use in the shop to remove viral infections from PC's that already have Norton installed, she said she obviously didn't need it, and Norton was doing just fine, since she hadn't been infected yet. Without even mentioning the fact that it's quite likely she's already running a trojan or two in the background (about 90% of PC's are infected in one way or another...about the same amount that either use Norton, McAfee, or nothing at all, heh), that's like jumping from the roof of a giant building, and noting ten stories down, "So far, so good.". Eh.
The same goes for antispyware progs...I don't use SpySweeper, or any other piece of garbage thrown out by some over-educated, under-intelligent, ultimately unknowledgeable suit posing as an expert. I use Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition, HiJackThis, ASquared HiJackFree, plain ol' RegEdit, and a few specialized tools here and there, all of which are FREE. And what do I find on the average computer...? Everything SpySweeper obviously didn't, which is about 75% of spyware and adware infestations, and anything made in the last two years or so...and suddenly their PC, which the makers of their protection software told them was experiencing hardware problems that couldn't be fixed, is now a rocketship, just like it was when they bought it for half the cost of all the software they bought with it. The guys at these companies must just sit on their hands, because it just doesn't matter what quality the product is that they put out...people will buy it because that's what they've heard to buy from Auntie Susan, or their friend the computer guru who, rumors tell, built his own computer once, with only a manual, all the necessary components, and a few phonecalls to tech support.
Just like Kleenex, things like Norton Antivirus and Microsoft Windows have become the icon for products of their kind, and that seems to be all it takes for Mr. Schmoe and his wife to look no further, and question not the company that made their flawless software when it suddenly exhibits flaws.
A hacker named The Mentor (Lloyd Blankenship, I believe) once said, "This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals." I'm not saying this founding member of the Legion of Doom was without fault...you can no more excuse away exploration of an unwilling administrator's servers than you can trespassing on private property. But he provides an interesting point. Another way to say it would be...he's right.
If companies like Microsoft and Symantec (parent company of Norton) decided it wasn't worth their monetary while to create software, someone else would, because there's a need for it. Not only that, but since they're not getting paid for it, not one of the people creating, or helping create this software would sit on his or her ass, pretending to work, or leech money out of the group in a useless job position...both things that occur en mass in large corporations like the ones I'm ranting so fervently about...simply because the kind of people that go out of their way to provide a free piece of software aren't in it for the money...and aren't lazy. They're either in it for recognition, good programming practice, something to do, or just because they want to help out.
So what really happens when people pirate software? Competition. There's no impetus for people like Bill Gates to make his company try harder...he has so little competition, it doesn't really matter what he does, or more importantly, doesn't do. But when people can download a copy of Windows XP Home Edition in a few hours, rather than paying $199 for it, MS scrambles to improve their anti-piracy methods, and eventually drops their prices a bit. And if they can't keep up any more, and move out of the market altogether, someone else comes and either makes a cheaper, better product, or a free, better product, and continues to improve upon it. It's called economics. Did everyone forget? But now, now, I know...it's still theft. I never said I condone it. I just don't mind that it's shaking up those cash mongers' artificially elevated lives a little. After all...fuck'em. Heh.
I don't blame MS, or Symantec, or any of the other companies I've mentioned with an ill tone. They beat the system, and managed to sell air at inflated prices...good for them. But now they ARE the system, and that can't be allowed. Keep supporting open-source, and if someone comes out with tissue twice the quality and half the price of Kleenex called Tissue Number Five, give it a try. Out.
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