Italian Association Develops OOoCrackz For The Piracy Market
By Roberto Galoppini
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-04-02
PLIO, the OpenOffice.org Italian Native-Lang Project association, announces the availability of OOoCrackz, an Extension that allow users to use the free and open source suite in a "crack mode".
The extension aims at answering the needs of 51% of the Italian market, that is in the hands of pirates.
Davide Dozza, PLIO's President, explains why the Italian association decided to develop OOoCrackz:
Reading " The Economic Benefits of Lowering PC Software Piracy", an IDC research sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, we understood that OpenOffice.org license represents an obstacle to the adoption of he suite for about half of the Italian population, actually using mostly pirate software.
OOoCrakcz takes away three out of four freedoms, making illegal the access to the source code, the freedom to modify the code and redistribute it, just as every other proprietary software.
OOoCrackz has been developed by a PLIO's member, Paolo Mantovani, one of the most known expert on OpenOffice.org macros and extensions expert:
The first release of extension allows only the activation of the "illegal mode", but we are working on an evolution of the extension that will prevent you from releasing documents under Creative Commons licenses. The risk to manage is that the user could inadvertidly respect the copyright law.
To provide you with a real experience of using a pirate software, OOoCrackz prevents the registration and block all possible updates. The idea behind such choice is to make soon your copy obsolete, eventually exposing the user to security problems as happens with illegal copies.
Italo Vignoli, PLIO's Marketing and Communication Manager stated:
The PLIO annual assembly announced marketing initiative to improve OpenOffice.org penetration in the Italian market. With this announcement we are targeting the illegal software market, a segment not yet addressed by our offer. This will reflect in our coverage of the market, and therefore we foresee an increase of our market share.
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About the Author:
In 2001 started up a small firm specialized in infrastructural solutions based on Open Source software. In 2004 launched the first Italian consortium of Open Source SMEs, becoming its president. Collaborates to academy research on Open Source organizational models and on Open Source meta-districts, keeps rubrics and writes articles on ICT magazines.
http://robertogaloppini.net
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