Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Widespread media reports quote Basescu as saying "Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania."
What's remarkable is that he said this in front of Bill Gates at the opening of Microsoft's global technical centre in Bucharest. Gates apparently ignored the remark.
It is not surprising to hear that young people in a nation with relatively low incomes have been using pirated software, and it can be argued that such behaviour actually benefits large vendors: no loss of sales occurs if the people involved would not have been able to afford legitimate copies, there is pressure on them to 'go legit' as they enter the workforce (especially when working in software development), and the vendor gains from increased mindshare.
In recent years, Linux would have been the obvious alternative to pirated software for the young Romanians. What do you think Microsoft would have preferred - a Romanian software industry built on experience gained on Linux or on pirated Microsoft products?
That said, software vendors can't be seen to be going soft on piracy for fear of weakening their positions in developed markets.
The surprising thing is that a senior politician was so unapologetic about piracy.
The country is one of the leading nations in eastern Europe in terms of IT, due at least in part to government policies dating back to the 1970s.
Romania's IT culture also has a reputation for producing hackers. A recent example was the December 2006 US grand jury indictment of Victor Faur, alleged leader of a group that hacked a number of computers at the US Naval Observatory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other federal institutions. He is also being prosecuted in Romania, which has led Eastern European nations in the introduction of anti-hacking laws. Such laws probably also helped the development of Romania's offshoring industry.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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