We love to be free
One of the reason why we do pirating is to get software for free. For example, You can grab Windows 8 with 0$ versus 75$. It’s worth!. But have you ever thinking about local software economy? Here are some reason for us to eliminate our pirating culture.
Reason 1 - Pirating is killing the developers
Software is developed through a time. For example, in order to create a product like financial management, professional will take one month or so, with 8 hours a day. Do you agree if I pay them for just 2$ to create one software. You would be agree if, we sell 10.000 copies so that it will be multiplied to 20.000$, but you wont be agree if a people that get 20.000$ is not the creator but the illegal distributor. If we do that, developer resources will be limited and hard to find.
Reason 2 – Pirating is limiting the investor
We know about BYOD (bring your own devices). BYOD improved the needs of software. The software is sold through a market channel like Apps Store,Google Play, Windows Store, and others. Building a software and selling a software is not that hard nowadays. People can subscribe to the market store and sell the software right away. This condition will increase the need of investment for new startup to create a software. Investing is about trusting the ecosystem, when the ecosystem is not give sufficient revenue because pirating activity, nobody will give us a good investment to create software
Reason 3 – Pirating is exposing your privacy
A bad hacker will jailbreak the software for a two reason. The first one is for “acknowledgement” the second one is for something big “like your privacy”. Using a cracks, keygen, or anything will help you to get your software for free but will give you a security exposure. Several crack techniques will create holes in your operating system or software. It will make you more exposed. Side loader or patching might not only to give you a good life for software without a payment but also give a possibility the cracker requesting any others data like your account, documents, and others.But not too worry you still can use the pirated software in offline mode, but what you expect from an offline software since many of the software now online.
Reason 4 – Pirating is breaking your warranty
If you buy a new notebook, installing a pirating one. And than you see a high activity of your disk during malware replication, after that you see your hard disk is crashed your software, you do a force shutdown and now your hard disk broken.You claim your warranty, and the service center knows you are using illegal software. They wont be accept your warranty since pirating software is the main cause of instability.
Reason 5 – Pirating is not good for education
If you are teacher or lecturer and you tell the students that you are using pirating software and tell them that the software is to hard to buy, you are in wrong direction as an educator. You will see that many software vendor gives you good way to get your software starting from free!. For example, Office for student will takes only 15$ or Windows 8 might be free for student if your organization engage an agreement with Microsoft with small amount of commitment. Others option is to go to the open source software, and it will be good also. Choosing open source or not is really debatable but you can thinks this just like analogy.
- Open source is free to get but limited support only from the community, or you should pay for support if you want it.
- Open source is good for education but commercial software is also good for education when you want to show the student that software field is promising.
- Is not about Open Source versus Commercial is about better together to build better local software economy. Imagine you learn open source software and someday you get better job in commercial industry that use commercial software, or you knows Windows a lot but your student work in SMB that use open source software. Academic is neutral they can choose anything for they need to educate the student for their better future.
There are several points that I will be shared in an event called “Pirating Software and Legal Aspect”. at ION Yogyakarta (10/12/12) with many government and institution works together to build better local software economy with open source and commercial software.