Eric's Beijing Diary

Well, the Chinese have really outdone themselves this time. The pirated a town. That's right. They copied a town in England lock, stock and pub. Actually, I think what they did was to take parts of several towns and copy them. Nevertheless, the individuals from those towns are more than a little put out by the fact that their storefronts have suddenly appeared in a new suburb of Shanghai.

Piracy is a way of life in China. The other day, I was showing the iTunes podcasting software to a student of mine who was interested in downloading English language podcasts. I told her that while IPOD is hardware that is perhaps a little expensive for her budget, the software is free. She gave me a motherly look, and I knew what was coming.

"You know, in China, all software is free."

She's right, I guess, and in some ways, I can't blame Chinese students, who could never hope to afford US prices for the software they need to jump through the hoops set before them. But it isn't good to maintain a culture where no one ever gets paid for innovation. The open source folks believe that all software should be free. While I am very sympathetic to their position, you just can't get around the fact that all of us benefit from software that would never have been developed if software could not be sold. If it were not for the commercial profitability of software, there would not be anything like Windows. We would all be using the geeky command line stuff that is the domain of open source types. Linux fanatics talk about how Linux is "as good as Windows," but in places where it is available, I don't see people fighting over those systems. The simple fact is that software has to pay if we want to encourage companies to design stuff like Windows. Think of it....What we call "Windows" is actually a 'C' program with some 30 million lines of code. It takes a huge company to produce something like that.

Microsoft has now signed an agreement with Lenovo whereby windows would be installed at the factory, and added to the price of the product. This is probably a good compromise. It will allow the software manufacturer to be compensated in a way that will allow further development, while keeping the software at a manageable cost.