Anyone ever bought anything on a site, or bought a "club" membership? I was wondering. I wonder who is doing that stuff, and where they are, that they can set up those websites. I used to see a lot of Radium stuff on p2p, but both R and p2p are pretty much gone now. For me, testing open source is a more interesting, better risk-reward ratio. I'm looking into usenet. Don't know the best reader and client. Still curious about the what else is going on.
Most of those cheap software are basically copies made out of the country and are being sold to people in the US for a lot cheaper prices. Since certain countries don't abide by the copyright laws and can't even be sued for it they are making copies left and right and selling them to pepople outside their country. When i was Iran this past summer everything is burned and knocked off as far as software goes. US has no control over there and they can't be sued for what they do so they continue to burn software and resell them on the market. Any program you want over there is basically about a couple of bucks.
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Thanks 2k. Good advice. I knew there were a lot of warez sold in Isreal and Russia, and now I know Iran, too. Hmmm. I wonder about Hong Kong.
I know some of the countries where alot of bootleging is prominent don't even have copyright laws that protect duplication in any real sense. I'd wager that Iran doesn't, as I know that in Iraq they were essentialy non-existant prior to recent events. I think all WTO countries have to adopt some basic level of protection, though I know that there are some strange quirks, specifically there are a number of countries that allow the marketing of generic formulations of drugs still under patent. Southern China is a big bootleg area, so I would assume the same is true of Hong Kong.
Open source and OEM are two different things. OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer. An example of this would be the copy of MS Office you get when you order it with a new computer. It doesn't come with all the retail packaging and the manufacturers are given a discount on the price which they (presumably) pass to you. Open source software is software which is distributed freely, along with uncompiled source code so that people can modify it and make it (presumably) better. The most obvious example would be Linux.
