Software Piracy is considered to be a greatest area of concern in the world of proprietary software business. Many biggies have been complaining about the million rupees loss they have been subject to because of the world wide software piracy that is being carried out openly. May be the system on which you are reading this page, runs on a pirated copy of operating system.Although there are lots of (effective) reasons that you may have for not using a licensed copy of the operating system. Lets illustrate some of them.

Top Five Reasons for Software Piracy

1. The software that we need is so much expensive that we can get 10 computers in that cost. Why do they need to charge a simple software so heavily?
2. I wanted to purchase a legal copy of the software, but it is not available in my region, and I couldn’t wait for its availability.
3. I have purchased a legal copy of the operating system, but mine is a small computer institute with 10 working computers. Now if I am forced to buy 10 CDs of a same software for 10 different computers, I will have to sell my home, my office and everything that I have.
4. I had purchased a legal copy of the software that I need for my business operation 3 months ago. However last month they have released a new version of that software with new features and security fixes. Now I am asked to buy that new version again. Can’t they show dignity to existing customers who have already spent a huge amount on them and provide free upgrades to such customers?
5. The CD that we purchased for the software needed by our firm got damaged last week, also when we had tried to take back up of that CD, it didn’t allow to copy its contents anywhere. Now when I report it to the vendor, I am asked to again purchase that CD. Isn’t this is ridiculous?

Get Rid of Software Piracy

If we closely notice these reasons, the common issue faced by everyone is the COST. The software cost for a very small purpose software too is generally so high that home users, schools, small and medium sized organizations can’t afford them. Also the dependency on an easy to use popular (Expensive) Operating System and Office Application software, is so high that people are forced to use pirated copies (either knowingly or unknowingly out of their wish). So now the question arises as to how to get rid of Piracy and live a decent life in the Information Technology Market? The answer lies in switching to Open Source Community.

Switch to Open Source Community

For all those who are new to this term, Open Source refers to those software where the software is developed for the free distribution along with its Source Code through the GNU General Public License. As per this license:

“Published software should be free software. To make it free software, you need to release it under a free software license. We normally use the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but occasionally we use other free software licenses.”

The Open Source softwares provide a world wide support platform with millions of developers and users. Upgrades released are freely available. There are wide ranges of Open Source Software alternatives to the commercial software. You can get a list of such Open Source alternate softwares at www.osalt.com.

Some Open Source Software Alternatives

Operating System

The most popular and (considered) User Friendly operating systems today are well known and commercially available. However there are Open Source operating systems available in market that are ignored just because of the rumours that they are difficult to learn and lack user friendliness. However there are large scale operating systems supported by Open Source community that have been successfully powering small to heavy duty systems, that too with robust efficiency, and virus free environment. GNU Linux is one such operating system. There are many flavors of Linux generally referred to as Distros. Some of the popular distros of GNU Linux are:

1. Debian - http://www.debian.org
2. Open SuSe – http://www.opensuse.org
3. Ubuntu – http://www.ubuntu.com
4. Mandriva – http://mandriva.com
5. FreeBSD – http://www.freebsd.org

There are lot many distros to compare and select as per your requirement.

Office Applications

The most popular commercial Office Application suite that is used world wide is very expensive. On the contrary if you want to try out free alternatives, you can try out these office applications which are similar to that popular application:

1. Open Office – http://www.openoffice.org
2. Lotus Symphony – http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home