[Itpolicy-np] Copyright, Piracy and Open Source

[Indiver Badal]

Hi

With the recent news report about the piracy of copyrighted movies and
so on on the media, I am eager to know how much clean we all are in
terms of software.

Everyday I see people buying shiny new laptops blessed with Windows 7
but there's no genuine sticker anywhere to be found. Everyone has
tonnes of software on their PC and Laptops and most of the time it is
installed by the vendor for FREE. There are shops in Newroad and
Mahabouddha, selling and proudly displaying copyrighted software and
movies. They have been running  their business for years and there's
no fuss about them anywhere. I am surprised that they are still
selling proudly while a couple of guys are targeted and put behind
bars.

Nagarik has done an entertaining news thingy, but have they checked
their own computers to see if they are clean of pirated software?
Well, it would be interesting to see how clean they are and also other
organization involved like Police and Government computers. Aren't we
all living in the murky water?

Its hard to make people understand that buying a cd for Rs 100 does
not entitle you the copyright to use the software. I can't tell about
movies, but we do have a choice on software: Open source software.

Fortunately we have a pretty good community behind open source in
Nepal and also lots of users. It should not be too hard to migrate.
For good or for worse I moved to Open Source for most of my software
needs years back and haven't looked back. I would like my government
to stop spending foreign currency to buy expensive software while the
Open Source can provide pretty cheap solutions.

Thanks
-- Indiver