@SBS1313 @piracy

Piracy was never NOT mainstream. Sure, there’s been niche markets that only folks in those folds have exploited, but with respect to common proprietary, closed sourced, copy-protected or keyed software, There’s never been a time, except for perhaps 0day, when there weren’t cracking schemes to thwart the sovereignty of a respective company’s copyright and licensing; and that has always been seen primarily a good thing - within reason, and in moderation.

Case in point. wp51.exe The most prolific word processing application at one time (for a very, very long time) - something that Microsoft couldn’t seem to crack, and never really did, or would have, had it not been for Word Perfect Corporation spelling their own demise with the introduction of a version aimed at competing with Microsoft Word in the GUI itself… something that they needn’t have bothered with, did bother with, and put all of their chickens in that basket that eventually spelled their own demise.

You see, this is but one example of a program that forced the attention of every corporate CFO in the Fortune 1000 and beyond; especially in SOHO’s, where there litterally has never been a training budget.

Word Perfect dominated the legal community and that of medical transcription as well. It was fast, it was precisely unambiguous in its display space and unlike Microsoft word, forcefully encouraged the user to forgo using that mouse-thingy. If a typist approaches 100 wpm, yet has to constantly remove one of their hands from the keyboard to interact with the program in someway, that translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year that a company has to spend in lost productivity.

But although that fact was the defining factor on why Word Perfect eventually eclipsed Wordstar and Microsoft Word never got a foothold in the professional market where anyone typing >=40wpm was in demand as an office employee, the real reason it reigned supreme was the avoidance of training expenses for newhires.

You see, what you purchase for software to run your business is to a very great degree, driven by the marketplace, and when you decided on whether to standardize on Microsoft Word or Word Perfect in your company, a quick survey of job applicants would reveal that (due to easy to use software piracy cracks) an overwhelming majority of those applicants were already proficient in using Word Perfect 4 or 5.

Now it deserves mention that this piracy wasn’t occuring in the business world, but rather, the personal, private spaces of the people applying for those jobs. A demographic very dificult to track down at the time, and even more dificult to prosecute with anything but a Pyrrhic victory in mind. It costs money to prosecute, and you can’t get blood from a turnip, as they say.

A simple exe could crack Word Perfect and it was also traded about through BBSes as an already cracked product. As expected, the low hanging fruit is what deer, and people, reach for. Word Perfect had always hung at eye level, and the market that pirated their software wasn’t going to buy it regardless, so they’ve effectively lost nothing, but gained everything - because the mass majority of typists were proficient in it’s operation, and if a company standardized on Word Perfect, newhires could hit the ground running with zero, or minimal training expense.

Lotus 123 and others had a similar story. SuperCalc, Dbase II, etc., were in use in peoples homes because tiny little programs distributed over public BBSes like COPY2PC could diskdup the system floppy and you could make as many copies of it that you liked, and give it to your friends. So much money has been spent on anti-piracy measures over the decades with not much thanks from software publishers, sort of; they will acknowledge the fueling of adoption of their products in the business marketplace due to the decisions of the bean counters who bowed to standardizing on software that most job applicants would be likely to already be proficient in.

There’s a whole culture, or perhaps, sub-culture of people who will buy DRM encoded books, strip the encoding, and then share those works in places like LibGenesis or priviate torrent trackers - just because they find DRM abhorrent!

The inverse is not true. Reasearch studies have shown time and time again that even if you charge for an ebook, if you make a big deal out of declaring that nothing you sell is DRM encoded, and ask that people respect the trust you have endowed them with, they’ll tell their friends to go and buy the book more often than not, when someone asks them to give them a pirated copy.

Go figure.

There’s something to be said for the honor system, but moreover, why pay someone that you would never trust in the first place for the privilege of having a license to use their software - their proprietary, closed source software product? Why, you could just use #FOSS instead, products like:

LibreOffice
GIMP
Inkscape
FrontAccounting
NextCloud
MariaDB
PostgreSQL
Nginx
Apache
Proxmox VE
KeePassXC or VaultWarden
Thunderbird
Firefox
VLC
Okular
KdenLive/OpenShot
OBS
Did I mention Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD?

Something I’ve always done with my customers, when unleashed to erradicate proprietary, closed source software from their premises, is to first acquire an internal audit of all of the costs involved in licensing such software in an ongoing model. Then, present those numbers, and after specifying that all things considered, labor costs will be the same not matter what (I’ll make the same amount anyway), but that they’ll never have to pay for another license again…

Then, require a firm agreement that each year the company contribute monetarily to most or all of the FOSS projects that produced the software they use. I actually leave just how much up to them, typically stating, “A dollar or a thousand dollars per year, I’m going to leave that to your conscience, but each year, look at this sheet of paper showing how much you would spend with that proprietary software that you could never really trust your privacy or company’s secrets to anyway, and then break out your checkbook in good faith.”

I leave the rest of that story to the honor system.

#tallship #FOSS #Software_Piracy

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