Tuesday, January 25, 2005
BSA to crack down against piracy
According to Daily Times, Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced that they will be taking strict action against national and multinational companies after the 60 day truce period ends on January 29th. According to a BSA study, Pakistan's software piracy rate is 83%, which causes a loss of US$16 million to Pakistan's IT sector. What puzzles me is how Pakistani multinationals can spend billions on advertisements and sponsoring a gazillion shows, but can't purchase licensed software. However, buying licensed software is still not an option for the common user - its high time BSA realizes that unless they don't lower the cost of the licenses, no one will give up paying Rs.40 for Windows XP.
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3 comments:
Meet a senior Chinese IT person few days ago on dinner and the topic of piracy came up in his view for Chinese if the software is more than few bucks its worthless what was interesting was he mentioned that they not only pirate it but try hard to come up with a “Chinese” version of the software so average Joe can learn and develop skills easily I agree the price of software products have to match the “40” Rs. Pirated CD else their is no incentive for the customer.
40 Rs. Are you out of your mind? You want Original OEM Windows XP at 40 or even 100 Rs. with one year free customer support, not to mention seamless downloads from MS site and so on and so forth. You gotta be realistic just like BSA and others have to be. It doesn't have to be 8000 and it shd never be around 100, I am comfortable paying somewhere between these figures and everyone else should be. We grew on piracy and the end result is worse than any frigging economic figure. We lost how to respect intellectual property. Our magazines, newspapers, IBA grad, LSE grad and our seths, not to forget our programmers and others in IT field forgot how much does it actually cost to make a quality software (oh, yeah, I am including MS products, they ain't frigging idiots if they control economics). Another outcome of this can be seen in senseless RFPs and other financial documents where local companies charge invariably (with rest of everything almost equal) to their information products...
It's gotta end sometime, why not now? I am trying to be realistic to face some problems and sacrifices after years long of "ayashi" and "free meals". May be others'd like to be too.
If they give XP home "free" with PC in N.America why can't they sell it for 40 to 100 buck in Pakistan? And remember we never called Tech support there is a Computer Grad in every neighbor in Pakistan now :), Product is driven by the customer demand and target Market. Not to mention GNU world which suites perfect for 3rd world countries. I was in talks with HP Pakistan few years ago and they started off by quoting 60K per PC which was sharply dropped to around 42K when I mentioned I could get better support better price from local market to which the compete I never said better "product " :)
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