IT-brainwasher

The problem of digital piracy has risen up into a huge storm cloud above the both “home users” and vendors in the last decade. The roots of the problem lies in the modern economics model and owners rights.
A big collision occurs on the junction of 2 hardly doubtful interests:

• work must be paid
• information should be free

I would like to draft up some trends that have been noticed at nowadays regarding the problem of piracy in different branches of the industry.

Software piracy.

The kind of piracy related to copied and “cracked” software is actually not as horrible as it might seem from the first sight. The reasons for relatively calm situation around software users and vendors are coming from the smart policy that was offered by the most important software vendors, e.g. Microsoft.
However game developers may suffer from piracy and looks like they do. In this aspect the game industry is rather close to “media content” than to the ordinary software.
Reasons for that? Extremely expensive  production with a limited market.
What is the solution? Apparently some of the game-production company will have to bankrupt, but the rest could join together in some way and successfully collaborate with the mainstream software vendors and even scientists.

But let’s name those policies and the models corresponding to them which keep software vendors up:

• Preloaded operating systems with the devices allow customers not to feel the  “weight” of buying an operating system on their pocket that much.
  Preloaded Windows XP on a new laptop costs you only a few tens of dollars included into that price. The idea is awesome – everybody is happy. Vendor has been paid and customer has a new laptop. No piracy.
  Actually the idea can be developed further on the different kind of devices or accessories. That requires a close contact between OEM vendors, software vendors and end-users, analysis of the market statistics on the usage of software with different hardware (I will try to describe some general ideas about manufacturer-customer relationships in another post).
• Distillation a software package into a number of  editions, some of them can cost very few or even be free of charge.
  Obviously consumers differ. One might need to install a real-world enterprise server and another will only use the computer for listening to music or watching clips on Youtube. That wouldn’t be very fair to charge the same price from both of them when they want actually different things. The concept of editions allows customers to pay only for the components they need. Excellent idea. Piracy melts down..
• Non-profit foundations and open projects. The disadvantages of open and free projects essentially are arriving from their advantages. A project is open means that practically nobody is responsible for its quality. The question of quality may not bother many of end-users but when the software is used by organizations the quality is important. Therefore, nowadays many open projects work by the scheme: free product but paid support. “Home user” can use it without support and does not pay. Piracy is eliminated.
  

Media content piracy.

The most painful part of the digital piracy problem are connected with media content such as music and movies (also games in some way). What is common between all that stuff? Either big expenses in production or “narrow” market of distribution, sometimes both.
The song of one particular singer requires big efforts on the implementation and recording but targeted to quite a limited amount of people who really want to listen to that (radio broadcast listening doesn’t count because it is “passive” listening rather).
A big problem is that none of the models mentioned above for software doesn’t seem to fit. Movies or music can’t be distributed with player devices for the reasons of market: the market of devices is wide and the market of songs is narrow, etc.
However the idea of editions came for movies into the broadcast movie-trailers and various formats of medias (DVD, Blu-ray), that does not help much about piracy for the same reason: the production of a movie is too “heavy” for the market targeted.
For example, if they would make the movie-trailers as full-time movie in reduced quality, that could surely decrease the piracy, but could be failure for the total income. Although it is possible to figure out more kinds of “extra” editions with uncut scenes and so on.

That should mean that some structural changes for the media content producers are inevitable. What kind of changes – we will see.

I decided to note up a number of the software products that I found useful for myself and tried to explain why.
All the products are free of charge, but some of them are not open what is marked in the text.
The list will be being updating from time to time.

1. Mozilla Firefox.
   http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
   This browser in my mind is one of the biggest phenomena in the first decade of 2000’s. An open project has never been as qualitative and friendly. Along with the huge popularity it makes the browser amazingly powerful. The amount of extensions is just unbelievable and many of them are made on the level of commercial products.
   What makes the browser so great? A world-wide developers community.
   What makes me think that Firefox will be only growing up? A large base of users.
2. WinCDEmu.
   http://sysprogs.org/
   An open source program for virtual CD/DVD drives. A great example of a user-friendly development.
3. 7zip
   http://7-zip.org/
   An open source solution for archive management.
4. Pidgin
   http://pidgin.im/
   An IM open source program which supports many protocols.
5. Notepad++
   http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/
   An open source project of a text editor with features.
6. StarDict
   An open source dictionary. Seems perspective, but it is still far from perfection.
7. VirtualBox
   http://www.virtualbox.org/
   An open source software package for running virtual machines. Supported by Sun.
8. PortableApps
   http://portableapps.com/
   A great collection of the application that can run also in a portable mode. Strongly recommended.

Free but not open software:

1. Avira AntiVir.
   http://www.free-av.com/
   A nice and free antivirus solution which has also a paid version. In a free version it pops up a banner window once after update. A free version can’t be installed on a Server platform. Made in Germany.
2. Paint.NET
   http://www.getpaint.net/
   A program for fast and powerful image editing.
3. Mp3tag
   http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
   A program for managing your media library. Manipulates tags for Mp3 and not only.

While the development of operating systems was always up to users, once we came to a very limited number of OS’es that are used and supported. The reason for that is enough obvious – operating system is a bit expensive to create. A huge amount of hardware available dictates strict rules to the potential developers of an “independent” OS.

In order to cover the expenses to create a desirable operating system, the operating system must be sold to a large number of customers and therefore must support all the customer’s hardware. On the other side, it also must run applications. The development of any commercial OS for PC is driven by those two “rulers”.
Opposite to that, open OS’es are more free in their rules, because they do not take any responsibility for the product. And that’s the thing we should not forget when comparing between different operating systems. Both commercial and open approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Since we live in the world of capitalism the commercial development is just inevitable simply because that’s how it works.
But that does not mean that all the commercial organizations are equally good for the public. Their policies can differ a lot and it is important to understand which one is “public-friendly” and which is not.

The question about “what is Microsoft? is that a good thing?” has more actively sharpened in mind with the famous European issue about the Internet Explorer. For me personally the “problem” looks more than just idiotic. For the first, I consider a web browser program as an important part of an operating system the way like Notepad, Wordpad, Paint and Calculator. Even when I might not like the basic web browser integrated into the OS, it never prevents me to install and use more suitable one without any limitations (e.g. I like to use Firefox). At second, when Microsoft creates a product, shouldn’t it decide for itself if to include a web browser or not?.. And one more question, wouldn’t it be more useful to ask Sony when we will be able to install a Firefox on PSP? What about a honest concurrence of the commercial and open source developers on their beautiful console? I hope it is now more obvious about how ridiculous is the claim about Microsoft which just wants to ship their own solution for web browsing as a basic tool.
The point is that one should learn to see where is a monster and where is not. My answer is that Microsoft is a giant but not a monster. If you want a monster then buy Sony.

See, they aren’t monsters:

Now about hopes. The last years went by with a noticeable negative reaction on the Windows Vista. Many consider it a big failure of Microsoft, although some did get the desired features up there.
My opinion is that Vista is good enough but didn’t come in a right time in a right place. A huge amount of low-end computers were not ready for the Vista requirements but were labeled so though. A huge part of users were not ready for new Vista features because they weren’t presented well enough. As a result – bad sales, bad talks.
However it looks like Microsoft guys learned the lesson and the Windows 7 goes to be pretty good. Based on Vista, the new OS comes with many features that are understandable and clear.

For  more details, read the Engineering Windows 7 blog.
This is how the Windows looked longer ago.

Bill Gates + Steve Ballmer take a ride
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win101