Posted on Wednesday 7th of November 2007 at 16:52 in Software

Does open source (and free) software reduce your pirating? 61% say yes

Over 12 months go I asked my readers whether open source software reduces your pirating and the result was very half-and-half. Well, this year I've asked the same question again and the results have shifted.

The original question was asked because of my article from September 2006 stating that open source software is kissing goodbye to piracy. This was made popular on Digg and therefore I received a lot of feedback from users - many agreeing but equally many disagreeing. Therefore I created the poll on the site in an attempt to obtain a statistic as to what users felt.

The 2006 Results
In 2006 the results showed 51.8% of users felt open source software did reduce their need to pirate, with the other 48.2% disagreeing. This was just shy of a 50/50 split on the situation, which seemed fair.

Why I asked again in 2007
2007 has been a big year for open source software; OpenOffice has grown from strength to strength and let's not forget the rise-and-rise of Ubuntu. This year Ubuntu Linux was offered as an alternative operating system to the mainstream market from vendors such as Dell; the first time this has really happened. This shows how far open source (and free) applications have come, so I felt it worthwhile asking my readers once again how they felt.

The 2007 results
For the benefit of skim-readers who just want to see the graph; here are the results:



As you can see, 61% of users reported back that open source (and free) software does indeed reduce their need to pirate applications. I asked a couple of regular users specifically why they felt this was true (using their comment nicknames):

Harpo: "I feel that with things like Paint.net, GIMP, OpenOffice and all the stuff Google is doing there really isn't a big gap for you to pirate stuff. I guess stuff like CS3 is still a prime target but MS Office is no longer a concern of mine"

James: "To be honest with you, I've not managed it yet but I've been toying with moving away from XP to Ubuntu so that's a good enough reason, right?"

Daniel: "I do still need a lot of commercial stuff to do my job, but when you take things like Aptana, Quanta Plus, Eclipse etc into the equation, you really can get by quite happily without anything commercial. So yeah, it does reduce my need, but not eliminate it altogether"

So that's a 9.2% shift towards "yes" in a year
Last year we saw 51.8% say yes, this year we have 61%. I make that a 9.2% shift towards a world less plagued by software piracy - which would be good. This positive shift is certainly due to the good work that a lot of people are doing. As I've said already, the big projects are really getting noticed now and when massive vendors like Google are offering excellent free online services (such as Google Docs), it suddenly becomes really hard to justify pirating Microsoft Office.

I don't have much more to say on the topic, the results speak for themselves. If you're interested in free applications check out my 70 coolest free applications around article or Andrew Sellick's 100 great free tools for web developers to get you started. Check back in November 2008 to see how the updated results!

 

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