Open Source Software have come a long way. If they had not, a non-tech person like myself would not have heard about it. Growing up in a developing country where there are no laws about digital piracy, I did not have a problem with pirating software after software. I was in eleventh grade probably and I heard someone talking about buying an antivirus. I thought what an idiot! why do they pay for it? it is absolutely free on the internet.
Broadband had just come to our town and I thought with the internet everything was free. A little did I know that you pay for it, one way or the other, hence the constant breaking down of the operating system. These were the days when Windows XP was still in trend and because I and all of my friends were pirating software, we had not found a perfect copy of windows 7 yet. Although back then, we did not have to do a lot of work on computers even for schools and higher secondary schools so breaking downs of the operating system was not a big deal. A lot of the time we would be fixing the computers rather than using it for something.
We were all pirating software but our definitions might have been different regarding the legality of these things. Even though I pirated a lot of software and content off the internet back in those days but I knew that it was wrong. I was not sure about the legality of it. I had contemplated, like how do software companies make money if everything is available for free to download. As awareness is an ongoing process, back then I would have believed that if somebody told me that you could write software in a week or a day. I had no idea about the amount of the work that went into the tech I consumed taking it for granted and for worse illegally.
About the time I was in college I was sure that it was all illegal to pirate the paid software for free. I have studied a little bit of economics in college and I must tell you how drastically different is your buying behavior when you live in an underdeveloped and mismanaged country. Most of the software and tech-related things are made to distribute in the whole world. Problem is that pricing is mostly set in dollars. Now developing countries will be consuming these digital products as imports and they will be paying in dollar amounts, which might seem adequate if you live in a country where the local currency to the dollar exchange rate is not huge. If the exchange rate is terrible, forget about buying software on the impulse, a few subscriptions a month and you will be paying a major portion of your pay for the software. That is why pirating software is not a big deal in countries where the buying power is low and per capita income is terrible. That is why I chose to search it out and find out if there were any of the alternatives for the software which are industry standard or used by millions of people around the globe. Of course, there are bound to be opportunities when you look for them. I had almost completed the college when for the first time, I bothered to look for the term open source. Up to that point, I had just thought of it as a synonym for free stuff, which is almost true most of the time but it turned about to be a lot more than that. It was a great moment for educating myself.
Open software run by contributions of its users and the donations is such a great idea but I still think that it is never going to match with the commercial software in terms of resources. Lack of resources is the only constraint that has held back the open-source community for so long. Most of the users are low income based which means they are not able to give out donations because if they could, the major portion of them would not be looking for free and open-source software in the first place. this is such a predicament but despite all odds, few of the open-source developers have made a huge difference in their respective fields. Even though I don't use blender at all, but what blender foundation has done for the open-source community is amazing. Free 3D suite for all to use but you have to only pay for the extended support and extra stuff like assets and premade models. This model has passed the test of time for the blender association and now the community they have built around them is never going to leave them. Even movie studios are using blender for their projects now.
It takes some time to completely give up on piracy as I mentioned I don't have a legal consequence or nobody would be socially boycotting with me if they found out that. That is why, my journey from pirating software to embracing the open source software was quite long. In the start I would try to use the alternative and few days later I would go back to pirating software.
Nowadays I do use a lot of open-source free software which are legal and I would be paying a lot for the proprietary software if it were not for the open-source material. At some point, I will start paying in form of donations and it will be worth it because software like Gimp, Inkscape has freed me from thinking about Adobe products which will amount a lot if I am going to use them for a long period. Most of the drawing or photo manipulation work I do is for personal needs and this aforementioned couple of programs are capable of doing everything that I like them to do.
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