extreme newbie

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:05:59 -0400, Peter Hansen wrote:

> Furthermore, protecting you from someone else making money off a copy of 
> your program is basically what licenses are for, and if you have noticed 
> they don't protect even Microsoft (see, for example, entire governments 
> like the Indonesian government, which has mass-pirated Microsoft 
> software for a long time).

Please call it what it is: copyright infringement, not piracy. Piracy
takes place in international waters, and involves one or more of theft,
murder, rape and kidnapping. Making an unauthorized copy of a piece of
software is not piracy, it is an infringement of a government-granted
monopoly.

In any case, there is a powerful argument for wanna-be Microsofts to
turn a blind eye to copyright infringements. It worked for Microsoft and
almost every other successful software company.

The biggest barrier to success for software developers is getting people
to even know your software exists. The second biggest barrier is
encouraging them to try your software. The third is getting them to keep
using your software once they've tried it. Actually collecting money from
them is at the bottom of the list -- you can't expect people to pay you
for using your software if they don't even know you exist.

Apart from the occasional public rant (such as Bill Gates' plea to users
not to make illegal copies of MS BASIC), in the early days Microsoft
didn't go out of their way to chase copyright infringers. If they had, the
users would have simply stopped using the MS software and used something
else. Instead, people grabbed copies of Word or Excel from their friends,
taking market share from WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus etc. Eventually,
they would need an upgrade, or find it more convenient to buy than to
copy. Every so-called "pirated copy" had (at least) four benefits to
Microsoft: it denied a sale to Microsoft's competitors; it increased
users' familiarity and confidence with Microsoft's products; it built
Microsoft's brand recognition among software purchasers and IT
departments; and it was (usually) a future sale to Microsoft.

It was only as Microsoft approached monopoly status that copyright
infringement began to hurt them more than it gained them. With few if any
competitors, the loss of revenue from unauthorized copies of Word or Excel
or Windows became greater than the benefits.

-- 
Steven.