Is the adoption of open source systems being hindered by the rampant piracy of proprietary software?
So says Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems Inc. for the OpenOffice.org open-source project, who discussed the phenomenon here at the 10th annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention.
“Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say, ‘Why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,’” Suarez-Potts said.
There is no direct financial loss to Open Office when someone has a pirated copy of Microsoft Office. To the extent that BSA enforcement actions cause fear in the market, that just benefits open source, so why join it?
On the other hand if we helped Oracle enforce its license terms we might accelerate the move to mySQL and Ingres.