Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures. In India too, while piracy dropped by two percentage points, in value terms, it rose to $2 billion in 2007 as compared to $1.28 billion in 2006.

The price of software increases every year, the total value of software piracy as calculated by it is bound to increase even if there's a dip in piracy rates. There's now an open-source alternative for almost every major software need, ranging from databases and office suites to business applications.

In most cases, the implementation of Linux in Indian enterprises is by Red Hat. Novell is the other prominent Linux vendor. However, if one has an in-house IT maintenance department, it is possible to choose from hundreds of other Linux distributions — Mandriva, Debian, Suse,PCLinuxOS, Knoppix and Ubuntu, to name a few — for desktops and enterprises (especially small and medium companies). Linux today has gained the support of corporations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Novell.

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