Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures.

Alexander Ponosov, director of the school in the village of Sepych, Perm Territory, who has found guilty of installing pirated Windows software in 12 school computers, has changed jobs. He is now engaged in popularizing the free Linux operating system, Window's biggest competitor, after winning a competition held by the Russian Federal Education Agency (Rosobrazovanie) to test Linux in school computers in three regions of the country. Ponosov received wide attention after the local prosecutor charged him with installing pirated software in school computers.

A frequent meme in piracy trash talking is that piracy is linked to malware (example). If your child is downloading pirated material (so the argument goes) they will be downloading it from a malware infected site and infecting their own computer resulting in poor performance, data loss and ID theft. A variant of this argument is that the downloads expose the kids to evil pornographers.

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs. It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community.

Recently there have been numerous discussions on software and media piracy, with a few people even saying that open source could be the solution to stopping software piracy... However, software piracy is one of open source's biggest enemies, and few people realize that.

"There is an alternative to pirated software. You don't need to pirate software to use good software. We often read raids of shops and businesses using illegal software. People want to use software, and FOSS is an alternative," said Dr. Giovanni Tapang, member of the Computer Professionals Union and Agham, an organization of Filipino scientists and engineers, in an interview last week.

Software costs money. Some people avoid this cost initially by slyly using an unauthorized version, or what is called pirated software.

Ever since the dawn of commercial software, piracy has been a problem without a realistic solution that meets the needs of both the software vendor and the end user. From serial keys to outright DRM (digital rights management) schemes, the software industry has left no preventive measure untried.

There is no equating software piracy, the theft and misuse of copyrighted software, with using open source, where the license specifically allows and encourages the redistribution of the software. Piracy violates the terms of the copyright and license. It's possible to do this with open source software as well, by not following the terms of the license.