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Why is so much software cracked?
tsaint:
My perspective on this is coloured by being a teacher. At the school I'm at, we use ms office, photoshop, snagit etc etc - all our software is fairly expensive (it is all licensed and legit). So, all our students use it and hence want it themselves at home, either for compatibility reasons or because it might be "top of the line" software. So what are they to do - they are almost all 18-24, migrant, and poor as in living on their own, maybe with a child and on govt support. A big temptation to resist and I'd say its the school's fault.
My suggestion is for schools to use open source/freeware alternatives to help students avoid the lure of pirated software. If "industry standard" software is needed for a vocational course, so be it, else don't use it and students would then have compatabilty as an incentive to use open source / freeware at home, as well as having their consciousness raised on this issue.
I'm sure this is the same in schools everywhere in principal.
I'm not the network manager and so haven't any responsibility for it at my school - Carol might have a different perspective to me.
nudone:
My perspective on this is coloured by being a teacher. At the school I'm at, we use ms office, photoshop, snagit etc etc - all our software is fairly expensive (it is all licensed and legit). So, all our students use it and hence want it themselves at home, either for compatibility reasons or because it might be "top of the line" software. So what are they to do - they are almost all 18-24, migrant, and poor as in living on their own, maybe with a child and on govt support. A big temptation to resist and I'd say its the school's fault.
My suggestion is for schools to use open source/freeware alternatives to help students avoid the lure of pirated software. If "industry standard" software is needed for a vocational course, so be it, else don't use it and students would then have compatabilty as an incentive to use open source / freeware at home, as well as having their consciousness raised on this issue.
I'm sure this is the same in schools everywhere in principal.
I'm not the network manager and so haven't any responsibility for it at my school - Carol might have a different perspective to me.
-tsaint (May 29, 2006, 09:30 PM)
--- End quote ---
i think that is a very good point.
outside of your situation, it's kind of sad that those who go for the pirated software do so without even considering the free open source alternatives - probably because they don't know they exist (and maybe because of the snobbery of not wanting to use something that was genuinely free).
just think of the paradigm shift if every pirated version of photoshop was replaced by the gimp and every pirated version of ms office was replaced by open office - and, what the heck, every dodgy copy of windows xp was replaced by something like ubuntu.
what a beautiful world it would be...
Carol Haynes:
I'm not the network manager and so haven't any responsibility for it at my school - Carol might have a different perspective to me.
-tsaint (May 29, 2006, 09:30 PM)
--- End quote ---
I've not taught anywhere for a long time that had enough money to buy expensive software so the issue has never arisen. I have to wonder at the sense of an educational establishment paying for MS Office when they can install Open Office for free. OK there are issues but even at academic license prices it must be horrendously expensive.
I can understand your students dilemma thought - both MS Office and Photoshop even at Academic prices are not cheap.
Carol Haynes:
The trouble is there really isn't an open source equivalent of Photoshop. The Gimp can do some of it but it isn't really in the same league at all and not really aimed at photographic processing. I suppose the cheaper solution for students is to get Photoshop Elements which does most of what Photoshop does these days (unless they need to learn about prepress, CMYK etc).
jgpaiva:
@tsaint:
Actually, in my university, something similar happened.
Until not too much years ago, everything was made in windows / top of the line software. But i am at a big university, which means that buying that software for every computer would be too expensive. What happened was that they used pirated software in some computers.
But the problem was that an inspection came, and they found this pirated software. The school had to remove the software.
What happened? We now do everything through the cheapest alternatives (linux, free compilers, etc).
But there's a big problem with this. Most of the time, we are using material that is much harder to use (since the free alternatives sometimes aren't as good), we have to keep 2 operating systems installed (windows for ourselves and linux for school), and, most of the time, we learn stuff that we won't actually use, because it's aimed at a platform we don't use (like linux).
For example, at a class i have, "operating systems", we learn how an operating system (at least, a good part of it) works: LINUX!
Which means, that i can use multi-threaded programming and such, but only in linux, since the instructions in windows are not the same / don't work the same way (or so i have been told).
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