H piracy directly affects the «adoption» of Linux, thus helping Windows
Norwegian economics researcher Arne Rogde Gramstad in his latest study titled “Software Piracy and Linux Implementation” suggested that the former may have a beneficial effect on Windows’ market share. In other words, the availability of pirated versions of Windows results in fewer people installing a operating system on their computers, thus increasing Windows’ market share.
Piracy is one of the reasons why Windows was able to maintain its dominant market position, turning an open-source software operating system like Linux into a “forgotten victim» for copyright infringement.
«I consider that a 1% increase in the piracy rate in a country is expected to reduce the proportion of Linux users by about 0.5%.» explains to TorrentFreak, Gramstad.
According to Gramstad's findings, the percentage of people using Linux would increase by 50-65% if pirated versions of Windows were not available tomorrow. This increase would lead to Linux having a usage share of 1.5-1.65% (currently around 1%) in the average country. So, in the absence of software piracy, Linux would be a more widely used operating system. In other words, this means that Microsoft's dominant position is actually being strengthened through piracy.
“For operating systems, piracy has contributed to the dominant position of Windows, which in reality has undermined competition among open-source alternatives such as Linux,” said Gramstad.
Three are the possible reasons that prevent the adoption of Linux (in any form) because of piracy:
- Illegal copies of Windows are cheap and a good alternative for the beginners
- The competition from piracy will possibly reduce the prices of legitimate copies of Windows and
- Windows piracy can cause an increase in the differences in the benefit of using Windows compared to Linux, such as the approval of operating systems that are linked with network externalities.
The research says that Linux would lose about 0.5% of its overall market share if there was a 1% increase in piracy in a country (based on data from 104 countries sourced from Net Applications). In other words, in a world without software, the Linux adoption rate would be somewhere between 20 and 40%.
In simpler terms, if a pirated copy of Windows is available to people, they tend to adopt it. However, users are more likely to take a legal alternative, namely Linux, if pirated versions are less widespread in that country.
