Russia is amongst the top 10 nations responsible for usingpirated software. According to studies conducted by Bussiness Software Allaince (www.bsa.org), 83% odcomputers sold in Russia run on pirated software. Incidently, the top ten pirated pirated software countries are listed below:-
Vietnam 90%
Zimbabwe 90%
Indonesia 87%
China 86%
Pakistan 86%
Kazakhstan 85%
Ukraine 85%
Cameroon 84%
Russia 83%
Bolivia 83%
Russia IT minister Dmitry Milovantsev recently said that the cause of high piracy rates in Russia was more the fault of software vendors than that of the users! Now that may sound like a really tal claim, and a lot of you will be going, “Oh no, not another person moaning about how Microsoft should take into account the earning of the average Russian!” Do Russians really want a crippled version of XP, like the one India saw a few years ago? Will the Russian public pay to have a Windows version which allows only three windows to open at a time, especially when the “free” version that is available from the local market costs almost nothing and gives you full functionality? It’s an old debate, and we are not going to get into that…
Those of you who want to sit down and start shooting off an e-mail to Mr. Milovantsev and point out that open source is always a viable alternative might want to hold off hitting “Send” on that pirated Outlook window for a while… apparently, in a bit to reduce piracy, Microsoft does not allow hardware partners to sell computers without Windows loaded. So Russians have no choice but to buy from smaller assemblers or fork out the cost of the Windows OS that’s preloaded on their machine. But the bit that really stinks is that if you buy from these PC manufacturers, still insists on using an Open Source OS, and do not want Windows loaded, you have to shell out an extra $50 to have the company remove Windows! Now that’s just a cost of formatting your PC- they won’t load Linux for you!
We’ve heard of extreme measures being adopted to combat piracy, but this one takes the cake! Hopefully with Vista’s new phone-home type security, which forces you to uninstall it if you haven’t payed for it, will get rid of such ridiculous policies.
For those of you who are interested on knowing where India stands on the piarcy list, don’t worry, we aren’t in the top twenty however with 72% piracy, and an evergrowing number of users buying assembled PCs, we will have to spread awareness if we want to avoid being put on the list of shame!
One thing you need to remmember is that this 72% figure means that for every 100 Indian users who buy a computer, only 28 buy genuine software. So according to BSA, even though Vietnam tops the list of shame in terms of percentage, it is not the country with the most PCs running on pirated software. Take China for example: studies and estimates put the number of Internet accessing users in China (not PC owners), stand at around 120 million.
Lets supply BSA’a stats to this figure: 86% x 120 million = 103.2 million Chinese users run pirated software. Compare this figure to vietnam’s entire population of 84 million humans, and you should get what we’re saying…
