Friday, July 11, 2008

Software Piracy

I will not argue with anyone regarding piracy and intellectual property rights does and don't.

I know that poverty is not an excuse or exemption for having a software cracked and used, but I am not in a place to tell it was wrong since I my self done it over few years past.

When I acquired my first computer, I am just a student then. My computer was given to me by my Mother who worked hard for me to have one.

It was AMD k6 500mhz on S3 VGA with 128mb of memory. Enough to install Windows 98, Me and later Windows XP then retired before XP SP1 release. The whole computer is still on service, it just retired from my usage, I gave to my wife nephew.

Pirated Software? Yes... I think the only license software that I used back then is Norton Antivirus which was included on my mother board driver CD.

When I was still student, I will not learned VB6, Macromedia (Flash,Dream Weaver), Office (EXCEL,WORD,POWER POINT, ACCESS), Html Scripting, Photoshop and whole lots of other software that is not free. Those pirated softwares gives me the knowledge and awaken my curiosity on different things, I looked at the world differently from the day I created my first C++ and VB6 hello world.

I only heard about Linux and Unix from one of my intructor and honestly didnt know WTF it is. She describe it beautiful and lots of word that dont even make sense to me. I didnt know that it was an Operating System untill I graduated and start looking for a job. I thought that it was just a software that install on Windows.

At the end of this post, I just want to say that I am not againts software piracy specialy for all Filipino student who cant afford to buy software that will teach them more. There are lot of free software available today on the internet that will replace all those commercial software. But let me point that markets looks for developers, users, designer who are experience using and manipulating commercial software. So what are the chances we can compete?

I am not againts it, but I do not encourage it.

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