Piracy Built the Romanian IT Industry...any different here?

Here is a post inspired by an article on Slashdot commenting on a report in Washington Post about a weird incident.



Romanian President Traian Basescu in front of a important audience and more importantly sharing the stage with Bill Gates himself, admitted that piracy of Microsoft products helped Romania come this far in the IT industry.The event was the opening of a technical centre in Bucharest.Bill Gates,however ,refused to comment on the President's words.The President said that piracy helped the younger generation discover computers.

It is well known that Romania is a IT powerhouse in Europe. And it made me wonder if India was any different.Romania ,though having enforced its anti-piracy laws 10 years ago,still loses 70% of its revenue from software sales due to piracy. Same case here...

Probably this is a what-point-did-you-make post but I just wanted everyone to reassess the situation in India. Do we really need to have pirated software. As a entrepreneur rightly said, a country with so many programmers and genii doesn't have an ingenious OS from the bigwigs Infosys and Wipro ,to name some of them. It is a shame that we proudly say that we 'serve' by providing customized solutions to some customer i some country. And feel more great by having more customers from various countries, apparently concentrated in US and North Europe. I dont expect the companies not to do this but what have the heavy weights done for the software industry in terms of finished products. Do you use one software that says ©Infosys ?
When there are small groups of individuals(it is what I mean "groups of individuals"), trying hard to compile code through the nite with limited resources, why the hell do these companies come forward to support them. The government has made its effort in the form of establishing C-DAC but that is barely enough to pull out a large country like India.

A better effort from the biggies should help...check out all the projects on Slashdot,Sourceforge and freshmeat ,they tell a lot about the determination that programmers show in burning their midnite oil.

This post,dedicated to all Indians who put in great effort in making computers more accessible to the masses of India.

[NpoWEr] signing off...