In this article courtesy of /., Aaron Fothergill makes the argument that software liberation is hurting the "little guys" struggling to compete with the big developers. The argument is flaky at best, but it does demonstrate the variety of rhetorical attacks available to commercial developers in their efforts to villify software liberators.

This effect seems to run across to games too. You don't have to look at budget and shareware titles when the latest big thing is available as a free download or hot off your mate's CD burner. Even the fact that your downloading time is taken up with downloading a whole CD's worth of game means that you're not downloading a whole bunch of game demos for other titles. On the Mac this will impact even more, as the big, well known games will always be the PC ports, thus Mac only or Mac first games developers are hit with yet another disadvantage. Attempts to introduce popular budget titles will fail when the full price titles are available for nothing.

I hope that no one reads this quotation without smirking. So, downloading that copy of Halo will prevent you from trying out some lesser-known titles by indie developers. Yeah...Right.

One thing does strike me about this article, but it's something that the author doesn't address: How does software liberation affect open source software developers? Let's just assume that Microsoft found a way to totally eliminate "illegal copies" of its new Windows program and, by extension with its Longhorn project, shutdown pretty much all unauthorized distribution of its and other "trusted" software makers' products. This is a hypothetical situation, of course, because I don't believe any software security could be this good, but let's just say--what would happen? One possibility is that people would turn in droves to Linux and free open source OS.

It could be that the ease with which people engage in unauthorized distribution of big software products like Windows, Adobe, etc, does prevent the open source equivalents of these products from making an impact. It may be that the better the big developers get at protecting their wares, the more people will turn to open source alternatives. It is also likely that the surge of new users will lead to better beta-testing and higher competition among open source teams. We may also see a rise in for-pay support groups and even corporations dumping money into these pools to further development.