Posted on Monday 6th of November 2006 at 14:01 in Software

Does open source software reduce your pirating

Back in September I postulated whether Open Source software is helping Kiss goodbye to piracy. Fairly obviously there were two clear groups surrounding the topic - those who agreed and those who didn't. Those who did felt that the open source community was passionate, involving and produced some fantastic free applications that remove the need for users to pirate commercial applications. On the other side of the argument, some posed that commercial applications have more functions and better compatability and is worth pirating. Read the original article here.

Where do the majority of users sit on the subject? I felt like continuing my current form of running polls on the site and set up one to tackle how users feel on the topic. Hence this one was established.

The Question
"Has open source software resulted in you not needing to pirate / pirating less?"

Two answers, Yes vs. No. Very little room for interpretation and this is not a topic that is going to be influenced much by a potentially biased readership - which this has been accused of being before. It's quite a standard question - has open source software reduced the need/market for pirating applications.

The Results
Well the results were typically inconclusive. 51.8% agreed saying it had reduced their piracy urges, with 48.2% disagreeing. See below for a rather un-needed graph of the result.



While the above chart is rather un-needed it adds to illustrate how close the results really are, that the piracy problem isn't really being tackled by open source software. Some would argue that more than 50% of the vote indicates a good portion of the market, vendors would agree with me, that 48.2% is still a high percentage of pirates!

So why?
I personally like Open Source/free Software, it has a busy community and is often less "spammy" than commercial applications. The most common reason given for pirating commercial applications is that they "do more", which is a fair thing to say. Photoshop does a lot more than GIMP, but you would expect that out of a $500 or so application.

What can be done?
To expect more out of free software and the supporting community is unfair, they already do a fantastic job on the most part, and it would be equally foolish to expect vendors to make their software cheaper (although I'm sure Microsoft could spare the change). Maybe attitudes need changing, that you don't *need* to pirate something you can't afford, there are alternatives.

What are your thoughts?
I'd like to know what you think, the poll only states whether open source software reduces your piracy or not, it doesn't show attitudes.

 

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