I read this at www.geek.com
NEWS
Longhorn, Microsoft's next version of the Windows operating system, is on sale now in a shopping center in Johor Bahru in Malaysia for US$1.58. The pirated version of the OS originated from code handed out to Windows programmers during a conference in October. The fact that the Holiday Plaza shopping center has its own police station does not deter store owners from displaying racks of pirated compact discs alongside early versions of Longhorn.
The news comes despite a drop of $74 million dollars in trade losses between the U.S. and Malaysia as a result of pirated software compared to last year. Jonathan Selvasegaram, a corporate attorney for Microsoft, warns consumers purchasing the pirated copy of Longhorn that "It's not a ready product." Longhorn is not expected to be launched sooner than 2005.Read more on this topic at Reuters.
Someone's Opinion on this (from geek.com)
BRIAN'S OPINION
"If $1.58 buys you Longhorn I can only imagine what Windows XP sells for. This latest development is a drop in the bucket compared to the continuing problem with piracy in Asia. It boggles the mind to think that even though it is supposed to be illegal in Malaysia to sell pirated software it is still occurring.
In fact, it's occurring in a shopping center with its own police station. That clearly shows how seriously Malaysia is taking the problem. Heck, some of the police officers stationed out of the shopping center probably have some pirated software themselves. It truly wouldn't pay for a company to develop software in Malaysia considering the incredible lack of enforcement concerning piracy laws.Even if it is available I don't think it would be smart for someone in Malaysia to pick up the early version of Longhorn.
Betas are bad enough; I can only imagine how poor a pre-beta beta would run.Good luck to anyone who picked this software up; buyers may find that US$1.58 was too much to spend. They're not really getting anything anyway; by the time the final code comes out it will probably look completely different."
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MY COMMENTS
The actual PIRATE here is the person who leaked the beta version of Longhorn. True
I agree with some opinions that say, it's not right to be selling pirated stuff but hey, if you were in Malaysia or any country in Asia at least and you haven't actually been ignorant enough to dismiss the Asian region to be one of the most competitive in the world today, you will see the irony of it all. Pirated softwares actually help them prepare their economies to be more knowledge based
Not many of these people in Asia could afford to buy Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows XP, Adobe Photoshop CS, Dreamweaver or most quintessential softwares for the average computer savvy person. I'm sorry, in the modern capitalist world, not everyone lives in the US-Dollars-world. It's not their fault that after conversion, these original softwares costs Malaysians probably a quarter or half of their one full-month salary, EACH
What do u think that these guys the big US companies outsource from India grew up with tonnes of cash in their bank account and they bought and learnt all their knowledge through ORIGINAL softwares? Get real. Stop bashing Malaysia for saying it's got a police station in the shopping mall, bla bla bla... because you're missing the BIG picture. I personally have seen Longhorn on sale in Singapore last month. And so, are you going to criticize Singapore now?It's not to say piracy is right. It is not
If i made a piece of software, I would want people to pay me for it. But if people told me in response, hey your product has a lot of bugs, it has flaws that people can exploit and poses security/virus/privacy risks. I wouldn't be proud to make people pay hundreds of dollars for them
I don't know how Bill Gates sleep at night for making us pay crazy prices for something that is used by 90% of the world's computers. The monopoly of Windows. I can't even imagine what that figure would be like but it definitely sounds like a good place to start teaching economies of scale. If he made people pay USD$155 for Microsoft Office Suite and multiply that by the amount of computers which would eventually install the software, he'd be filthy rotting-skunk stinking rich, just with that software suite alone. Isn't it supposed to be that if you sold more of the same thing and produce them in masses, the price per unit would come down? Refer to economics textbooks if you're still lost here.
These softwares, in which case, would cost the average man, their whole month's salary, upon conversion to the local currency. Yes, US is probably the economic capital of the world. But where do you think Nike produces their shoes? China and Indonesia. Where do you think your AMD and Intel chips come from? Malaysia. What would you be paying if you actually bought computer parts fully designed and manufactured in the US? With its very much higher labor and raw material costs? Try multiplying what price you are paying now for a Pentium 4 chip by 4 or maybe 5? Thats just one part. What about the sound card? The taiwan made Nvidia video card you have there? How about the RAM? Why do people say that they can't believe technology companies set up their bases here because of the rampant piracy issues that Asia face? Well, if not here, where then? Your grandmother's backyard? You ignorant shallow and one-dimensional geek (refer to Brian's comments on top)
I cannot explain the full length of the consequences of total worldwide banishment of piracy. It's a whole cyclic effect. This post would've made you realize that a part of the piracy problem, is a bigger part of the solution. Education.
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