On Wed, 9 May 2001, Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:
> I would heartily recommend that you and the council (and everyone there!)
> work to solve the problem that is blocking foreign software companies from
> doing business in Iran: the international copyright issue.
I highly agree with you. I have pushed this position many times, but the
the problem is mainly economical: when the average monthly wage for a good
developer is $200 (the common wage for a normal worker is 50$ a month),
how can the developer or the company pay the price of the licenses? When
all of the good universities are here without tuition, when a CS
undergraduate obtains a photocopy of Concrete Mathematics for his course
from his department for less than $2, can he suddenly pay $50? The economy
will simply crash to a doom.
There are long-term programs for adapting international copyright (the
first goal is really WTO membership), but the best of them is 5 years from
now.
There is also another barrier for US companies who want to sell software
in Iran: the US government ban for trade with Iran. This created an
ethical problem for us, when we wanted to contribute to the Mozilla
project: we found that we may not even download the source code (see
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/).
> I can just about guarantee you that Windows support for Farsi would be full
> and quite solid by now if they had been shipping to the Iranian market there
> (after all they first started in Win 3.1 and would still be shipping if it
> were possible to not see people copying the software and selling the
> copies!).
Yes. But they now have a solution, the copy protection mechanism they are
using in XP can be used in a market like Iran's. Now that they can control
every copy, they can lower the price for poor markets like ours, so people
can afford it.
There is also another approach for software producers: they can target
Persian users outside Iran. We will help them have good Persian support,
so they can sell more to them. And no, this is not a small market,
according to a recent statistics, only last year Iran has lost 220,000
experts who left the country for good ("expert" is defined as having a BSc
or working full-time in a specific branch for at least 10 years).
> I don't know the official MS story on Farsi support for XP and beyond, but I
> have to believe that the unavailability of Farsi's single most compelling
> market has to have a negative impact on priorities. Wouldn't you agree?
I agree. But any ideas? We really appreciate anything related.
--roozbeh
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