An alternative to piracy?

[rocketmaster]

Someone told me on these forums that piracy is illegal, and that we should look for an alternative. Is this true? Not the part that piracy is illegal.

[RobertX]

Well, there are many alternatives, yes, even aside from paid software.

These days there are software cropping up as freeware and Free Software. I'll attempt to explain both.

There are software that you can use for free, and that it is licenced as free. There are many flavours of them. Some are fully free, as you may know from many distributions of GNU/Linux, Libreoffice, Netbeans. Some are made for free, but if you want a version of better functionality, you have to pay for the full version, these include antiviruses and Winrar. Some are best to avoid, like adware programs that promises to-good-to-be-true programs.

Among the ones I mentioned, some of them are open-sourced, meaning you can take the code and tinker with if you wish, without paying royalties to the originator of the code. These include GNU/Linux, Libreoffice, and Netbeans. These programs don't promise to be free-of-charge, but they usually are. Most of them are under the GPL, the General Public Licence.

If you're wondering how you can get one, you're probably using them. Firefox, Avira antivirus, or the GNU C Compiler (gcc), right now.

Further reading:
A Note on Freeware: http://www.arachnoid.com/freeware/index.html
Free Software Foundation: http://www.fsf.org/
Libreoffice: http://www.libreoffice.org

I hope these help and I wish you good luck on your adventure!

[connor17]

Someone told me on these forums that piracy is illegal, and that we should look for an alternative.

I doubt very much that someone here told you that.
Piracy is just a catchy name, people use it because it's fun, that's all. In fact, piracy historically was not "illegal". Sea Dogs were pirates according to Spain, but for protestants nations they were just privateers, this is, mercenaries that later become Sir by the english queen.
What I mean is that morality has nothing to do with law or economics.

Is this true? Not the part that piracy is illegal.

Piracy, as I said, was never illegal. It depends on where you lived in.
Nowadays, file sharing is not illegal neither, depending on where you live in.

Even today, the english navy use the pirate flag:



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...-time.html

[NIK]

...we should look for an alternative.

You say that as if you've never seen or even heard of shops before.