On Tuesday 12 December 2006 17:26, Dinesh Joshi wrote: > On Tuesday 12 December 2006 15:20, Aparna Appaiah wrote: > > It is true that people can (and should) pay for services related > > to free software. I wanted to emphasise the fact that people do > > not have > > Aparna, people are ready to pay provided the cost is reasonable. > Last I checked M$ charged 14000-18000 INR for their M$ office. Who > in their right minds would afford it? The casual home user > definitely wont! :P This is the root cause for piracy...
Aww..pleease cut out the rosy romantic hero robbing to provide for his ailing mom and marriageable sis. The above implies affordability which translates to disposable income. Most owners of PCs would fall into middle or uppermiddle class - disposable income >>20K per annum. Which would mean that even M$ stuff is affordable. And most of the pirates are not home users but edu institutions, sme's, banks, corporates and wealthy individuals with multiple pcs whose disposable incomes / capital investements are orders of magnitude more than the cost of the entire IT setup!!. > People > are/will use FOSS as long as it doesn't cost them a pretty penny ( > reasonable cost is ok ) and gets their work done. The moment you > start charging a whole lot for your software ( maybe it proprietary > code or FOSS solution ), the same people will start "pirating" it > ;) If there is no big stick, there is no compliance when it comes to costs. Even in the case of FOSS (near zero costs to the guilty), coporates with cash to burn did not comply until whacked with a legal clu stick. -- Rgds JTD -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
