http://www.linux.com/feature/151124Very good interview!
For those who don't know, H D Moore is one of the best known security researchers, the primary author of the Metasploit tool, and an all around smart guy.
My favourite line, and something I've said myself, is this:
Yet Moore says the computer industry can thank the warez scene for its incredible growth. "The industry would not have made it where it is today without pirated software. The people who had the interest and more importantly the free time to learn how to use commercial software rarely had the money to afford it. This left aspiring artists, system administrators, and programmers no choice but to pirate the tools that they now use in their jobs."
The growth of the open source software industry, he says, has happened for the same reason. "The free software movement and the open source development model managed to grab market share from the same group of folks who would otherwise have had to steal commercial software. The increase of open source adoption and the rate of new open source projects is being driven by the entry-level folks who can't afford a multi-thousand-dollar toolkit. Once these folks have those skills, they bring their experience and that software into the organizations they work for, where it has increasingly become part of the core infrastructure. In both of my last two companies, the number of Linux and BSD systems on the network greatly outnumbered Windows and OS X. These days, there is a trend for developers to move from Linux to Mac OS X -- oooh, shiny -- but only because of the same free software available on the OS X platform."
I 100% agree with that, and it's why, as I've said before (possibly not here?), anti-piracy measures are eventually going to shoot the software industry in the foot. For example, the bigger (enterprisey) tools like Sharepoint and SAP are frequently frowned on, because the IT guys don't know how they work. Giving free licenses to individuals using the software and requiring businesses to pay is a great business model, as is providing the software for free and charging for support!
