Most of the times but not all the times, Software piracy is one of the major nightmare of any product based company whose survival solely depends on developing and licensing the software but being a software engineer i know how much effort,resources and money goes into developing a piece of software so cracking, using key gens will lose revenue from the sale of their products and also affects the R&D for the next version and directly affects the Software developers and their hard work.
So why the damn i am writing about the software piracy in my blog? thats because for the first time ever i thought of purchasing a piece software to my computer by spending few bucks, reason? reduced price!!!
every one knows how how important a anti virus and internet security for a computer is? for many days i was hacking the loop holes in these software's and was running on trial versions for more than two years recently i came to know by my friend that the cost of "Kaspersky Internet Security" one of the top antivirus software has been reduced(promo offer) to about 70% that is 25$ for three license unbelievable(this offer is valid only in india).
So one thing came to my mind is will people goes for counterfeit and cracking the software if it is priced ethically and made affordable to everyone? example: win zip is one of the most pirated software in the world it is priced at 30+$ per license according to statistics for every winzip license sold there are 10,000 users who use cracked the cracked version, 1:10000 unbelievable, what if winzip was priced at 5$ per license then not only people use original software but it would have bought a great profit to the company.
So how can piracy be drastically reduced though it cannot be completely eliminated?
1. Ethical and honest Pricing of the software, When we can get Openoffice suite for free, whats the point in paying 100's of dollars for similary kind of commerical program for few extra features? there are many software vendors who overprice their software for no good reason.
2. Smart Pricing, quoting different price for the software with support and without support, there are many casual end users out there who rarely use the software and does not require support more than 30-50% rebate can be given for software without support.
3. Giving special discounts to the students and schools will not only helps students but they will get familiar with your line of products which will be helpful for companies future.
4. Developing a powerful antihack technology so that it cannot be hacked though it is not that hard to develop, many software companies intentionally leave some loop holes, for some wierd reasons.
so above are the few things i recognized in my 7 years of computing on my computer why people tend to use pirated softwares if you feel my points are incorrect or still there are few points that can be added please share with us here and do not hesitate to pen down your views
4 comments:
yeah very true... i agree with you.
I feel its better to keep software free and let the donations channels open. Many software like spybot, hijack this, VLC media player are free for all... I would rather pay money there than spend on buying some paid software.
As you said, price is the main factor for s/w piracy. I mostly use opensource s/w whenever I can.
When we buy a computer, it may cost us around 15 to 20K. Then we have to buy Office that may cost 10 to 15K. No home user in India can afford that. Instead if it would be in the price range of 1K or so, more people would be interested in the genuine version.
Well said. I have the following opinions:
- I think psychologically people do not want to pay for something that they can't see/feel. That's why we can think of paying for the hardware, but not the software.
- Another reason is the pace at which software gets outdated. The lifetime of any software is really even less than the hardware. Purchasing software for a lifetime does not appeal. An annual license is sometimes more palatable.
- People do not want to pay for stuff they use infrequently. A pay per use pricing is helpful in such case.
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