jtd wrote:
On Tuesday 12 December 2006 17:26, Dinesh Joshi wrote:
Aparna, people are ready to pay provided the cost is reasonable. Last I checked M$ charged 14000-18000 INR for their M$ office. Who in their right minds would afford it? The casual home user definitely wont! :P This is the root cause for piracy...
And most of the pirates are not home users but edu institutions, sme's, banks, corporates and wealthy individuals with multiple pcs whose disposable incomes / capital investements are orders of magnitude more than the cost of the entire IT setup!!.
Very true. I had more success convincing middle class homes to buy a legal OS and use OO and other freeware.
People are/will use FOSS as long as it doesn't cost them a pretty penny ( reasonable cost is ok ) and gets their work done. The moment you start charging a whole lot for your software ( maybe it proprietary code or FOSS solution ), the same people will start "pirating" it ;)
If there is no big stick, there is no compliance when it comes to costs. Even in the case of FOSS (near zero costs to the guilty), coporates with cash to burn did not comply until whacked with a legal clu stick.
Even out of the FOSS world there is a lot of freeware (no-freedom, no-charge) available as alternative software.
Regards,
Rony.
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