Piracy fueling them and making stronger multinational corporations, and killing small companies.
Absolutely, I am sure multinational corporations have the technology and ability to reduce piracy against their software especially in these days but IMO it is a matter of benefits outweighing the costs and a dirty opportunity that could made use of to stay holding the market.
If they are going to reduce piracy against their software, more and more people may start going to free and open source alternatives which is harder on these multinational companies than just using pirated software. At least pirated software although it does not have direct returns to the software producer it can still guarantee popularity in the market for that producer while smaller companies trying to compete at "competitive prices" with these giants are crushed.
I am sure, provided the economical situation in Lebanon, open source software use can flourish and become really popular here(including companies that would provide support, technical assistance and application development on new platforms such as Linux) if an only if piracy was able to be reduced.
And if you ask know that software suits such as Adobe CS and Windows will be really demanded yet their prices are high you are wrong, once these companies see that demand on their products is becoming lower and that they are about to lose the market they would automatically lower their prices. And thus you can realize how open source and free software can not only contribute as a free alternative yet also a force that can cause a balance in the market, exactly in contrast to what pirated software is doing.
If you think on the level of free and open software's reliability and features (that some people argue it lacks against commercial software), once developers and organizations that develop open source software notice the demand they would surely respond by taking the user's need into consideration. Everything can be done by programmers and developers of open source software on the level of technology and brains, never ever try to think that software engineers and computer scientists at commercial companies may be smarter or more knowledgeable than those enthusiastic and noble open source developers.
The thing is that they are just not seeing any real requests and demand from people for features that people would like to add or have and this is why users should at least try using open source alternatives, see what they like dislike and give feedback as simple as that. But most people are directly driven by marketing, they see a Windows 7 add somewhere, they like it then ask for the price, they find the price heavy on them so they go and buy a pirated copy as simple as that. Ignorance has reached a stage where when you ask some people: what computer do you have? They say Windows. And many many people who are educated, university graduates, they say excel when they mean a spreadsheet, power point when they mean a slideshow presentation and word when they mean a text document.
IMO piracy has contributed positively to companies like Microsoft, at least it kept them in control of the market and made their products get into the blood of every computer user, regardless of the economical or financial situation of a country or region. I bet if there was no piracy in Lebanon, many people wont even be even using a PC so that they wont pay (those who just buy a PC to spend time on facebooook and play solitaire all day long).
