[icecoolz]

R.A.P.E ? Wow...thats a bit strong ? Anyways there is a simple phrase :

"You develop it someone will crack it" There is no such thing as absoulte security and absolute stability. If one belives in them then one is digging a hole bigger than themselves.

So I sit for hours together and develop a software and a cracker gets hold of it and voila!. So lets see as to exactly why a hacker would pay attention to my software. Well probably because of two things:

1) It costs a bomb, very useful but extremely expensive

2) Its very popular and used widely.

These are the two main reasons as to why anyone would crack applications. The second cannot be eliminated. Popularity is here to stay and hence any application with a registration/trial scheme is going to get cracked. So that leaves me with the first option the pricing. Lets see the average softwares that a person who surfs the net installs on his machine and is a must and lets see the commercial costs for it as of today. I am looking at only windows as we are talking about piracy here and also I am not going to discuss freeware alternatives since I am looking at the cost factor :

1) An OS from the windows series starts at 3.4K for windows 98 and goes upto 6.9K for the Windows XP Professional.

2) An anti-virus - McAfee, Norton are two of the most popular ones and are priced around 1.5K

3) A firewall - Zone alarm commercial is priced around 30 dollars I think

4) Office Suite - Microsoft Office 2000 starts at 5k and 2003 prof goes till around 9k.

5) Download Manager - Again if I look at non-commerical one then I would say Flashget which is priced at 30$ for the licensed version.

6) A spyware remover - Commercial one Adaware professional priced at 30$

7) A image manipulation software - Most widely used one is photoshop priced US$649.00

Now the above totals to around 43-48k from low to high end. And thats just a few of the essentials that one is looking in terms of commerical software. At that price I can get H/W which is quite high end and with warranty and also if I dont like my HW I can always trade it in for something else from the competitors if its within the first 2-3 months. THink you can do the same with softwares?

Software needs to become more reasonably priced. This will bring piracy down. But eliminate it ? Never. As long as there is something to be broken people will do so.