Open Source Piracy: Uncle BSA, Open Source wants you!
Dana Blankenhorn today reports about Louis Suarez-Potts – Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org – claiming that “piracy hurts open source”.
Piracy, the marketing name chosen by the Business Software Alliance to describe copyright infringement, is defined by the BSA as follows:
Software piracy is the unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted software. This can be done by copying, downloading, sharing, selling, or installing multiple copies onto personal or work computers. What a lot of people don’t realize or don’t think about is that when you purchase software, you are actually purchasing a license to use it, not the actual software. That license is what tells you how many times you can install the software, so it’s important to read it. If you make more copies of the software than the license permits, you are pirating.
Reading the piracy definition I understood that Open Source Piracy actually really hurts open source. Don’t get me wrong, you can hardly make more copies than the allowed number with open source, of course. Still you might distribute copyrighted open source software irrespectful of the license.
Google-O’Reilly Open Source Awards this year assigned the Defender of Rights award to Harald Welte, founder of the GPL violations projects, a sign that GPL enforcement work is receiving recognition. Well Done.
Open source products need protection too. All open source projects, either if they are developed by a community or a company, whatever open source license they choose.
BSA Members having important open source activity in place could ask BSA to help with that.
Apple, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, what do you think my friend?
Open Source Piracy? No thanks! by mrs.reed
priaterus and 
stefano maffulli 11:24 pm on July 25, 2008 Permalink
I think that the Software Freedom Law Center and its Conservancy program can do a lot in this respect. Lets ask Bradley what he thinks as I guess this could become one of the way the SFLC can be proactive.
priaterus 7:05 pm on August 22, 2008 Permalink
Piracy doesn’t hurt open source, its here to stay and the more you fight it, the larger it will become. Open source is a scam in and of itself. Companies get it for free then turn around and charge customers to use it, what a load of shit.
The future of the world is in freedom, everything will be free and poverty and greed will be put to its end Piracy is only one of thousands of freedom movements, so you’ll never stop it