Abramul Posted January 13, 2005 Share Posted January 13, 2005 You may have seen it: The Mona Lisa, holding a cigarette, with a backdrop of gas stations. It bears a caption of "They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" (TOP) "We disagree." (BOTTOM). What is it? A piece of propaganda from the Software and Information Industry Association, explaining to people why they shouldn't use ANY software that they acquire without payment.http://spa.org/estore/products/pms-00.jpgFull-size PDFI say, ENOUGH! I ask you to help me prepare a poster listing the products that they are pushing, and FREE alternatives to each! Are you with me? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
loveme4whoiam Posted January 13, 2005 Share Posted January 13, 2005 I whole-heartedly support any freeware or shareware product that will do its job better than a corporate alternative, but i'd like to know what products SPA actually pushes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cactoblasta Posted January 14, 2005 Share Posted January 14, 2005 Well the obvious one is OpenOffice.org. It seems to do nearly everything that Microsoft Office can do, with a much better spread of supported languages. It's also free. Sure there's a few holes in its features, but really if you need complex mathematical modelling support or a top-of-the-line publishing program you can probably afford a real program and not just an office package. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abramul Posted January 14, 2005 Author Share Posted January 14, 2005 AOL Time Warner, Bloomberg, Chemical Abstracts Service, Congressional Quarterly, Dow Jones, Factiva, McGraw Hill, Ovid, Proquest, Reed Elsevier, Thomson etc., but also software companies such as Apple, Oracle, Sun, Novell, Sybase, Vignette, and Veritas. Yet, a search of their membership didn't find Microsoft! Here's a full list of their members. EDIT: I hate same-color URLs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZoFreX Posted January 21, 2005 Share Posted January 21, 2005 I don't disagree with their message; piracy IS wrong and DOES harm the industry. Admittedly if Microsoft turned up at my house and demanded that I either pay for Windows XP and Office 2003 I would install Mandrake and openoffice so fast you'd think they were already waiting for me on another partition. Oh, wait. So, my piracy isn't harming them beacuse they get no money either way, but overall there are some people who would pay out. And it is after all illegal. I totally agree that there are free alternatives that are often better than commercial programs, but I don't think the poster's message was that free software is bad. I like the idea of pushing free alternatives though; people love free! PS Linux will never beat windows until it's easier to use. So far every incrementing version of Mandrake has supposedly made it easier to use, but now I can't find out how to configure anything - it's like using a bloody mac. (I say this not out of spite but because I don't understand macs.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zmid Posted January 21, 2005 Share Posted January 21, 2005 Piracy is theft. The only difference between piracy and walking into a shop and physically stealing a copy of Windows XP, for example, is that, in piracy, you're using electronic means to commit the self-same crime. Having said that, free alternatives to products (like OpenOffice) should not be stifled. If the companies making the pay-to-use products can't make better products by investing the profits made from selling it into the next version of whatever it is, they either don't deserve to be in business, or should start offering jobs to the people involved in developing the free alternatives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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