"Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition's technology part of the mythology of the computer industry."

--Microsoft, internal document [PDF]

Summary: BSA, IDC, IDG, and Microsoft are doing it again, spreading false propaganda about so-called 'piracy' in software

ONCE A year we get to witness IDG/IDC's moral corruption when it works with the BSA (see Business Software Alliance), which is in turn funded by Microsoft, just like IDG [1, 2]. This triangle of liars perpetuates Microsoft's lie that it suffers from so-called 'piracy' (Microsoft actually benefits from counterfeiting) and the funny thing is that the same company which conducts these so-called 'studies' also uses its publication arm (which some consider to be dozens of "trusted" news sites) to publish the resultant lies (Microsoft propaganda).

We haven't yet found this year's rebuttals to the propaganda, but it ought to be the same as every year. All they do is change the number of so-called 'damages' and dramatise it. The MPAA/RIAA/others do the same for 'content'. IDC is using IDG (its parents) to publish the propaganda, which was also put forth by the MSBBC (thanks to ThistleWeb who alerted us about this).

Here is a good new post called "Another view of game piracy":

While many game developers blame piracy for their decreasing PC game sales, it is clear that this is not the problem -- relatively few gamers are pirates, and those that are would mostly not be able to afford games anyway.

However, it's easier for these developers to point their fingers at pirates than to face the real problem: that their games are not fun on PC. The games in question are usually designed for consoles, with the desktop port as an afterthought. This means they are not fun to play with a mouse and keyboard, and don't work well on PC hardware. Their field of view is designed to be viewed from a distant couch instead of a nearby monitor, and their gameplay is simplified to compensate for this tunnel vision.

Blizzard is one of the most successful game developers in the world, and it develops exclusively for desktop computers. Why do they succeed where everyone else fails? They create games that are designed from the beginning to work well with the mouse and keyboard, and with all kinds of desktop hardware. If developers spent more time improving their PC gaming experience, and less time complaining about piracy, we might see more successful PC games.

With the Humble Indie Bundle promotion we've seen that when we treat gamers as real people instead of criminals, they seem to respond in kind. Anyone can get all five DRM-free games for a single penny, and pirate them as much as they want -- we have no way to find out or stop it. However, in just the first two days, we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each! Would we have seen this much support if the games were console ports that only worked when connected to a secure online DRM server? We'll never know for sure, but somehow I doubt it.

The short story -- in the case of games and software alike -- is that those who were not going to pay for the product anyway are better off using it. They are not lost revenue. Even Bill Gates admitted this when he said: “As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.” Adobe uses the same dirty tricks.

It is worth adding that this week we found quite a bit of "Open Source" FUD coming from IDG. Here is one daunting example and yet another whose message goes something along the lines of, "be very afraid of using Free software or portions of free/libre code."

Processes can be pretty simple for a company with 10 or 20 developers. First appoint an open source czar. It's important to have a resident expert to champion the effort. The other key elements are an approval process and a centralized catalog documenting open source components, where they are used and under what license. It all could be as simple as: You need to get permission from Joe and he maintains the spreadsheet and license docs. Automated solutions required by a big company would be overkill for you.

How is proprietary software any simpler? They always tend to ignore that. In fact, those firm that spread such fear (IDG gives them blogs) don't even practice what they cover; they are typically proprietary software companies. ⬆