What are your thoughts on filesharing and piracy?

The Mozilla foundation makes money through incentives from google and other companies. Google invests big money so that its search box is in the right hand corner of FireFox for everyone to use. Lots of foundations that are financially stable or profitable do this. You'll also notice Yahoo, amazon, ebay are also in this list of search engines ready to go with FireFox.

Eclipse is backed by giant Sun Microsystems I believe, I am unaware if Eclipse is actually creating some revenue for itself. It could just be in development simply because Sun uses/created Java. Eclipse may be licensed and I believe Adobe uses Eclipses' trunk source code to fuel their spin-off called Flex to deal with Flex development, perhaps Adobe is paying them something.

"Theft" is the incorrect word to use regarding "intellectual property" (which is itself a highly dubious term). More accurate words are: copying, sharing, copyright infringement. If I steal your car, you have no car. If I infringe your copyright you still have the film/music/software/whatever. You may not approve of either but you really shouldn't equate the two.

Your argument regarding financial incentive is provably false for music. 99% of all musicians have received little or no financial rewards from record labels. They are still going. QED.

For software it is more interesting. My suspicion is that the value of source code being available is so great that it outweighs any anti-capitalist disincentive. Less effort but less wasted effort? In fact, many many multi-million and multi-billion dollar businesses are based both directly and indirectly on open source software. Think how much money GNU/Linux has saved Google. If they then contribute 1% of that to Linux, Linux gets better. Then someone else will use it, and save money, and fund small improvements that they require. This seems to be working pretty well so far. (See recent figures for Linux on the server, Linux on the desktop, Linux on embedded devices, etc.) I'm looking at what's best for society rather than any one individual. If you are bright enough to be a professional programmer you will find a place that pays your way.

Honestly, commerce is the most potent driving force that stimulates innovation and the fruition of ideas. If someone feels that he or she can really make some kind of return on a certain thing (really it can be anything--software, music, video, a device, hell even just an idea), he already has major incentive to invest in it. Software companies buy brilliant minds to add features to their products and make more money. Prescription drug companies buy fresh graduates who know their stuff and cure more diseases. Cash flow begets idea flow and the cycle is perfect. The copycats out there are the ones who are breaking the cycle. Individuals who would otherwise be customers are downright stealing from the major producers and in some cases, turning a profit off their output (that is, a profit that is translated to a loss to the company). While to some, this is seen as simply as taking a few dollars away from the corporate fat cats who can't tell the difference, the real impact is felt among the workers, the peons. Programmers and researchers and every other day-in-day-out cruncher under the sun will suddenly find themselves out of jobs or find pay cuts in their checks. As much as Id like to believe that all people are truly dedicated to their craft, I know a lot better, in that most of them just want to be able to bring home dinner every night. So this is where I see piracy and the theft of intellectual property as a problem.

However, where I see this notion becoming a real quandary is through companies or individuals who have a stronghold on the market they compete in. Companies who try to monopolize their sector by buying out competition or by stopping end-user-driven or even end-user-requested customization or feature packing are really driving themselves in a hole with piracy. If a company practices in such a manner that doesnt foster to any real innovative growth or saturates the field with their own proprietary terms (i.e. microsoft and noncompliance to wc3) then I feel like they could be hit with an "equal inequity" that wouldn't exactly be considered kosher in most legal channels.

I guess one area that is sort of the odd-ball out in all of this is the open source community. It doesn't exactly cohere with most generic commercialization models that are out there, yet a lot of the ones we are familiar with (Eclipse foundation, Mozilla foundation) manage to stay alive financially. If someone could shed some light on how that works exactly, that would be fantastic... ebee

People make ridiculous amounts of money off of intellectual property. They harp continually about their money being stolen by "pirates" who share their files over the internet with other "pirates" for non-monetary gain.
If I want a copy of, say, Aqua's album "Aquarium", I could into a store and pay for it. But why should I shell out this much money (cds are more expensive than ever) for this cd, when all I want is that one song I can't get out of my head (or some other logical-sounding argument)? Welcome to filesharing. Where you can download that one song or that whole album, all for free.

I'm not saying that all pirating should be legal. I am saying that prices for some things are so high that some people would rather let their computer take care of it and they'll end up with the stuff. I can't tell you how many discographies I've downloaded because I'm not sure if I'll like the band. Half the time, I end up buying their cds anyway, because I want to support the band.
When a friend introduced me to a particular band, he handed me a few burned cds and said, "If you like them, buy these albums." I didn't so I didn't pay the money for them. They still sit on my computer, because other people I know like them, but I don't have to think about it.
I wouldn't have nearly as much music without piracy, and I wouldn't have nearly as much money without it.

But music isn't the only thing at issue here. Movies, television shows, software; these all have real-world accessibility. But most software (at least the software I want) is hideously expensive for all that you get two little discs and a crapload of code. ($400 for Adobe Creative Suite? Are they mad?) And sometimes, I want to try something out before I buy it. Like Sims 2, another popular download (at least for me). I wanted to download the new expansion pack, Bon Voyage, but upon reading about it through filesharing forums, I found it was actually awful and poorly coded. So I didn't spend the money on it, and I'll leave it out of my collection. I've bought all the others, so I don't feel too bad.

Movies and television are a sticky situation, though. My favorite new discovery right now is on-demand movies/tv from Netflix, where you can watch things you like on your computer instead of waiting for it to come out on DVD and rent them. I just watched the entirety of Heroes yesterday, and I am perfectly happy with the result. I'm paying for the privledge, to be sure, but at least I'm not getting arrested, or threatened with arrest, like last time.

I have been threatened with charges by Paramount, who put out the show Quantum Leap. I tried to download that show, our internet was turned off with no notice, and once it was back up, I went to download it again. This time the internet was shut off and Paramount told our ISP that they would arrest whoever was doing this.
Obviously, people who do this regularly would say that I found a bad torrent file that was being tracked. I instead went out and bought the series whenever I had a little extra money. I recieved it as presents. It also gave me a great story.

Let's just say, I'm all for television being traded around. It's like making tapes of a show and then sharing them with your friends. Same with movies. You can do the same thing, but as long as you aren't making bootleg DVDs and selling them, I think it's okay.
I think making cds is fine too. Long ago, in days of yore, people used to record tapes to give to friends. It's what half of High Fidelity is about. Mixes, and even outright copies of cds should be fine, again, as long as they aren't sold.
Software, I must admit, should be purchased. But the demos offered by the software companies should actually allow you to play with the tools provided and maybe just be a time-sensitive version that stops working after a certain amount of use.

It all comes down to money. Who has the cash to fork over for some $400 program or $20 cd set or $60 video game...and who doesn't. And who gets that cash once it's out of the consumer's hands.