The only kind of piracy I cared enough about to write...

[jeffcobb]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

Okay, time to throw some new spin in here... I'm a publisher (my wife is the author), I'm also an Open-source developer (lots of packages) and give away a lot of stuff 'free' to the net and deal a lot with copyright/copy-protection/DRM etc etc.

Now, my view on this whole debacle is simple - as the OP says, the horse has left the barn and there is no DRM scheme that will truly protect a given electronic media (looks like BluRay just lost the fight now that the master keys are leaked). There's no DRM on any of our free or commercial productions, we just don't see the point given that we are the content producers and publishers. Copies will get out there irrespective, those who would pay will pay, those who wouldn't usually won't but it doesn't matter- we actually win out because they get exposed to our work, that's a win for marketing.

When it comes however to the situation where the content-creator and the publisher are separate entities, I can see why DRM is constantly being worked on, because the publisher wants to 'reassure' the creator that their work is protected and the creator is relying on the publisher to market the goods hence they don't look to "pirated copies" for exposure.

Perhaps my view is a bit simplified but at this point it works well for us.

http://elitadaniels.com

It figures only another open source developer would get what I was trying to say (and failing badly apparently). I only have one package on SourceForge but it has a respectable number of downloads, not that it matters.

There are a number of factors at work here:

First there is a new form of economic Darwinism at work. When the only way to assess the quality of an item is post-purchase, the power was completely in the hands of the publishers of the item. This applies to movies, books, music, etc. How many times have you purchased a movie or book (not so much music but the idea is the same) thanks to a bit of well-done cover art, only to find out that the content itself had nothing to do with the illustration on the cover and just plain stunk? In support of this I use the example of Frank Frazetta, one of the greatest fantasy illustrators of our time. He was quoted (well I have video of him saying it) that he rarely if ever actually read the books he made cover art for yet the books with his cover art consistently out-sold other similar titles.

Now however, with everything "out there" you are no longer seduced by a cover or other artifice and person reading/viewing/listening to the item basically can "try before you buy" and then if an item is truly worth the purchase price you can pay it. Its not how the rest of the world wants it to work or wishes it did, but at the end the day, thats what it is. No longer is it the case where one spends $20 for a movie only find it was so bad they could not even sit through a single viewing. Unless the physical material is damaged, one has no choice but to have a Coke and a Smile and get over it and eat the loss. Yet for really good material (which IMO is stuff worth repeated viewings/readings/whatever) one doesn't have a problem supporting the maker of said material financially because they want to help them to keep making more of that kind thing. The thing is, it is now largely up to the character of the consumer combined with the creator to actually produce a quality product. IOW on one hand, the out-and-out thieves will be that and never spend a dime no matter the material or situation; at the same time, no longer can purveyors of dodgy quality stuff get away with the "this stinks! Tough, you bought it, no take-backs!".

However the makers of decent material (and again, that assessment is in the mind of each individual consumer) get rewarded by consumers who like what they do and want them to keep doing it. Again, this is not how the world wants it to work but this is indeed how it is....sometimes the material is good (or at least not actively bad) and you are happy to plunk down your hard earned money and other times some title might interest you yet when you actually see/read/listen to it you go "whew! glad I didn't waste money on that turkey". In the open-source world it is a meritocracy as it is in many walks of life; you turn out crud and you earn less/get fired/whatever. I am not saying this is an absolute everywhere but this is a fact in many walks of life. For now, the choices are in the hands of the consumers. Lets take a look at those consumers:

1. Technical literacy vs Technical Illiteracy: The folks in the former camp can be broken down into three basic groups:

1a. Knows enough about how things work to pirate material and does so actively purely for the purpose of doing it with no regard for any particular regard for what is actually being traded. How else can you explain Russian or Chinese (or other) pirates actively trading Benny Goodman Orchestra songs right along side the latest Lady Gaga (or whatever) tunes? These are the folks that will never ever buy anything at any price so they are dropped from the economic equation.

1b. Knows enough about how things work to get the material (video, audio, books, whatever) when it is not available any other way. Often these folks are more selective since point is not to pirate something but the acquisition of a particular thing (like say you remember a specific movie/song/book from your childhood or whatever, long out of print, not available anywhere at any price; yet if you know where/how to look, you can acquire it within the hour). This is the group that will buy a "legal" copy of truly good works and leave the rest by the wayside.

1c. Knows just enough about how things work to be dangerous. These people tend to share the greed/never purchase traits with the first group but are little more than button-pushers and frankly get caught easily because their greed makes them try to get every imaginable thing/title out there and share it with the world but unlike the first group are sloppy about it and are swept up in the periodic (yet embarrassingly inept) sweeps by the RIAA/MPAA/BSA etc. Note that these folks are another dimension of the Darwinism I was speaking of; since they get caught and taken out of the system. Case in point: Jammie Thomas.

2. This other group is one that will never learn enough about how things work to even download a single pirated thing (and I am NOT saying that as a negative; it is just something different people could care less about). The most they know of piracy is what they read in the news and they form opinions based on that. Also, the system they grew up with (strictly over the counter purchasing, buy before you actually see what you are buying) is rigid yet comforting one to them and they find things that work any other way abhorrent at best.

Sorry for being so long-winded on a weekend morning. This is not a manifesto or anything ridiculous like that. It is simply a different perspective on things and an honest attempt to trigger conversation. Not everyone will agree with this assessment and that is cool. I have been all of these people at one time or another in my life. Now I pay full price for everything that I really want; Thats why I will have 3000 DVDs in the other room, will pay $45 for CD done by a regional artist in Australia and do so with a smile on my face; I want them to keep making more of the stuff I like. Stuff that is 'speculative' WRT quality I will check out first before buying/going to the theater. If it isn't a steaming pile I will delete them item and run down to the store for a purchased version of usually higher physical quality. By the same token, I will not even waste the bandwidth to download most (read: all) pop music, etc. The world I live in is a strange coexistence of DRM (worked for Sony and then a famous game/slot maker, both of which lean hard on the "shiny cover sells crud" model) and do open source software in my off-hours meaning I give away my work under a license which means no one will ever make a profit on it and even run a free public web service in support of it on my dime. I have little tolerance of DRM but have equally little tolerance of people who pirate for the sake of pirating. It is amusing to watch the RIAA (for example) going after the leaves of the piracy tree and missing the trunk entirely when if they were even a little smart they could take out a handful of servers and cripple the system for a long time.

[jeffcobb]

And *that* boys and girls is how to kill a thread. Sigh.

[speakingtohe]

@jeffcobb
That is one long post

Lot of categories.

Taking first category as totally honest and last as totally corrupt, I can't help but feel that most people fall somewhere in between.

Not only that but individual attitudes, ethics, etc. can change quite often dependant on many factors.

My thoughts are do whatever seems right to you. If it seems right, there should be no need to justify it by saying you were forced by others to take this path.

If your children are hungry then by all means steal bread, and if restrictions or DRM force you into piracy because there are no other interesting books available for you to read well do the same thing.

I am not a totally honest person and while I wish I were, I do try not to make excuses to myself or others when I am in the wrong. I also try not to brag about it or lead others to do the same although I have not been entirely successful on either point.

I can totally understand stealing ebooks, I just can't think of a single reason that makes it a just or noble act.

Helen

[jeffcobb]

Not for a minute did I mean or attempt to justify anything; I was simply (or not so simply I guess) describing what I saw. The right or wrong, moral or immoral, that is up to the reader. I not so good or so bad as to presume to decide for anyone how they should act. As Helen said, most people are in that grey zone in between the two extremes and they will have to decide for themselves how to act. I know the path that I have chosen and feel comfortable with. The thing I wanted to bring to the forefront is that while there are at least token measures taken to stem the tide of music and movie piracy, its like nothing is being done to help the authors. Part of the reason for that is that unlike those other industries, it is indeed all already out there (ALL of it, literally every published word up to the most recent books. Without exception, every single book I see people begging for in the thread about wishlists is out there...and in the same download file) and because ebooks are a smaller download than even the shortest song, downloading an ebook is less of a blip on the broadband radar as traffic goes. As any engineer will tell you, nothing compresses like text. Trying to stop it is like trying to unsink the Titanic. What is before us now is how we deal with it. And the cynical side of my heart weeps to realize it is now up to the moral conscience of every reader. I wrote the above to remind people that the power/control/whatever is no longer where it was even twenty or ten years ago.

Long post? I thought we were a collective readers here...not TV addicts

[crich70]

You see the same thing with other things like food products. Go in any store and you will find brand name and generic cans of vegetables for example. In my area two such brands are Delmonte and Roundy's. Both labels sell a variety of canned goods. Delmonte's is more expensive (being a brand name) but if you could track the cans back to their points of origin you would probably find their contents came from the same field or near enough. Yet people will often spend the money for the brand name can. Another older example is from a story a college math teacher I had told the class once. When he was younger and tv's used tubes he worked in a plant putting the labels on them. He'd have a cardboard container of tubes and on one he'd put a RCA label and on another a Sony etc (not sure of the actual brand names as its been over 20 yrs) but the point is they were all the same tube but the stickers would identify them as different tubes according to the circuit diagram that the individual TV's and Radios had for the repair man to go by. And books often (or so I understand) sell more by what picture and blurb they present the potential buyer than any other thing.

Originally Posted by jeffcobb

How many times have you purchased a movie or book (not so much music but the idea is the same) thanks to a bit of well-done cover art, only to find out that the content itself had nothing to do with the illustration on the cover and just plain stunk? In support of this I use the example of Frank Frazetta, one of the greatest fantasy illustrators of our time. He was quoted (well I have video of him saying it) that he rarely if ever actually read the books he made cover art for yet the books with his cover art consistently out-sold other similar titles.

[MrPLD]

Originally Posted by jeffcobb

It figures only another open source developer would get what I was trying to say (and failing badly apparently). I only have one package on SourceForge but it has a respectable number of downloads, not that it matters.

Offtopic a tad but - what's your SF package? (my gear is at http://pldaniels.com/opensource-projects.php )

[jeffcobb]

The name is DVD Metabase. Its reason for being started for my wife who is disabled and stays home and in bed most of the time. Early in the thread I mentioned having some 3000 DVDs; that was no boast nor exaggeration. I wanted to keep her entertained all day while I am off at work. Even with a 5-DVD changer, she had to get up and work her way through the collection which was hard on her. So I built a NAS with some spare hardware and Linux and ripped content to that box, then built another setup box with a remote that mounted the NAS and turned the directory structure into a menu she could navigate.

Going through the above process, ripping the tracks, naming the files, using the right settings for the right types of video (movies vs TV vs animation for example) all got to be too much and when the NAS melted down 5 years ago (literally; heatwave in California) I had to rerip, rename every stinking file and extra feature. Taking a cue from CDDB I wrote software in Python to wrap the excellent HandBrake software to analyze discs, uses a basic rule-based system to sort out if it looks like a movie, a TV series disc, cartoon (a la Family Guy, South Park, XMen cartoons, etc). On foreign language discs it would seek out the english language track and if that did not exist it would fall back and seek out english subtitles. All of this was nice and helpful but the process of naming TV episodes, etc was a major PITA. So I wrote a server-side DB of DVD metadata so now when you stick a disc into a drive to rip, it hashes the disc and connects to my server; if that title is in the database it rips all titles and extra features with proper names, putting it all into proper folders. Currently our collection translates into 5.5 terabytes of data so with the touch of a remote we can watch any episode of any show we have ever seen or liked, any movie, anything.

Anyhow that's basically it; python running on both ends with some bits of libdvdread to assist. I basically wrote it for us but some other p
eople have been interested in expanding the system to do other things and I work with them on that. Link is here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdmetabase/

Back on topic...

[MrPLD]

Jeffcobb,

Always nice when a personal project becomes equally useful to others. Well done.

Paul.

[jeffcobb]

Originally Posted by MrPLD

Jeffcobb,

Always nice when a personal project becomes equally useful to others. Well done.

Paul.

Cheers for the kind words sir. What started out as a helper for my wife became more of a Frankenstein project over the years, adding interesting and sometimes wacky features to it. Since Freevo drives the front-end and I write as much Python as I do C/C++ on various systems though these days the C++ is written for embedded devices like slot machines and cell phones. The Python I like because it is so easy to prototype and concept (like this was). Ironically, even though I have almost all 3000 discs in the database, I have more European supporters than I do American and why is that important? Because the exact same disc written for a PAL system hashes to a different value than the American counterpart. Thankfully I gained a dedicated helper in London who wrote most of the docs, the install scripts and acts as a tester. He occasionally adds code updates too but that isn't his main gig. It is a very low-stress project.

Seriously though of the whole thing the server-side component was took about 3 hours to write, it went online and has had zero downtime or crashes in years. It is just Python wrapped around SQLite which I knew from working at Sony (it is the database that drives the PS3).. The front-end client actually came about because I was changing rip engines frequently as I was teaching myself how to do it (my first efforts were abysmal at best) so I wrapped its use in a script so I could feed it rather generalized input and it would take care of making the special calls to HandBrake.

[Richey79]

Originally Posted by jeffcobb

It is amusing to watch the RIAA (for example) going after the leaves of the piracy tree and missing the trunk entirely when if they were even a little smart they could take out a handful of servers and cripple the system for a long time.

I don't pretend to know anything other than what I read (and I practise a healthy scepticism about that) about 'the scene'. However, these organisations do use the police in an attempt to do just this every once in a while. This was the last time they did so: http://torrentfreak.com/the-signific...-raids-100917/

What effect has this had on piracy? Nothing that the smallest consumers at the end of the chain would notice. Perhaps a handful of films might not be released for pirating before their cinema release - but that's essentially all that has been achieved. This by a massively expensive operation funded by taxpayers' money in the employ of private corporations. It's not the case that these organisations fail to effectively discourage piracy because they conduct their operations in an inept way. There simply exists no kill-switch for internet piracy.

It came to light recently that a state-sponsored university in Iran was seeding Microsoft and Adobe software to P2P networks ( http://torrentfreak.com/iranian-gove...server-100824/ ). How can piracy be stopped, as long as many countries in the world take such an attitude to copyright, without completely closing down the internet?

Other than that, I think your comment is a very good analysis of how piracy affects economic systems involving easily copiable media.

I do think that, where ebooks are concerned, the model is going to differ somewhat from how the music and film industries were affected by piracy.

Originally Posted by jeffcobb

These people tend to share the greed/never purchase traits with the first group but are little more than button-pushers and frankly get caught easily because their greed makes them try to get every imaginable thing/title out there and share it with the world but unlike the first group are sloppy about it and are swept up in the periodic (yet embarrassingly inept) sweeps by the RIAA/MPAA/BSA etc. Note that these folks are another dimension of the Darwinism I was speaking of; since they get caught and taken out of the system. Case in point: Jammie Thomas.

I don't think this check will exist in the case of books. Ebooks are much smaller files than films and even MP3s; the publishing industry has far less money to make use of institutions such as the RIAA, and I suspect that the publishing industry is smart enough to realise that suing either your own customers, or people who would never have bought anything anyway, constitutes poor Public Relations.

Ereading devices are about to go mainstream. All of the people getting their new readers will be looking at the prices and availabilty of books online, as well as reading about the disadvantages of DRM employed by the online retailers. These people constitute the majority of the most serious readers in the relatively wealthy parts of the world.

Book publishing and retailing have to engage with ebooks quickly and seriously, deploying fair pricing-structures and getting rid of their DRM. If they don't, the only books they'll be making a profit on will be Christmas coffee-table books and YA / children's fiction. Of course, there will still be a living for writers who reach out to their readership and directly cultivate a relationship with them.

This shift will happen much, much faster than it did for the music industry, and we're on the tipping point right at this moment.

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by jeffcobb

It figures only ... for a long time.

Jeff, Have you considered just bullet pointing whatever it is you're trying to say? I read your first post in this thread and had no clue what your point was. I then jumped to the last page hoping for a little clarity and came across your post above. I then just gave up and decided to write this.

[jeffcobb]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

Jeff, Have you considered just bullet pointing whatever it is you're trying to say? I read your first post in this thread and had no clue what your point was. I then jumped to the last page hoping for a little clarity and came across your post above. I then just gave up and decided to write this.

Mike; That is the difficulty with addressing a new audience about a non-trivial issue; if the readers have no point of reference and you jump to the conclusion you leave them confused unless the fundamentals of the discussion are established. By the same token if you go too deep in establishing these same fundamentals and the readers by and large already are aware, it simply becomes tedious for the reader and they still may not get the point. My initial post assumed everyone knew all of fundamentals and the point of the post was implied: Everyone in the media, etc cares more about movie and music piracy than book piracy and book piracy was about the easiest thing out there because unlike music/movies/etc, almost every published work is "out there".

When it became obvious that some/many missed the point (one person oddly inferred that I thought movie piracy was OK) I tried to lay down the thought trail that lead to the conclusion that book piracy was easier and due to a number of factors was almost undetectable. As such it is up to the character of the reader to help support the written word whereas movies/music/software (I always forget that one because in my world, all of my software is free/Open source) has the MPAA/RIAA/BSA etc to help enforce responsible behavior in the consumer. By and large they are ineffective but it is more than anyone does for the authors of books.

[jeffcobb]

Originally Posted by Richey79

I don't pretend to know anything other than what I read (and I practise a healthy scepticism about that) about 'the scene'. However, these organisations do use the police in an attempt to do just this every once in a while. This was the last time they did so: http://torrentfreak.com/the-signific...-raids-100917/

What effect has this had on piracy? Nothing that the smallest consumers at the end of the chain would notice. Perhaps a handful of films might not be released for pirating before their cinema release - but that's essentially all that has been achieved. This by a massively expensive operation funded by taxpayers' money in the employ of private corporations. It's not the case that these organisations fail to effectively discourage piracy because they conduct their operations in an inept way. There simply exists no kill-switch for internet piracy.

It came to light recently that a state-sponsored university in Iran was seeding Microsoft and Adobe software to P2P networks ( http://torrentfreak.com/iranian-gove...server-100824/ ). How can piracy be stopped, as long as many countries in the world take such an attitude to copyright, without completely closing down the internet?

Other than that, I think your comment is a very good analysis of how piracy affects economic systems involving easily copiable media.

I do think that, where ebooks are concerned, the model is going to differ somewhat from how the music and film industries were affected by piracy.



I don't think this check will exist in the case of books. Ebooks are much smaller files than films and even MP3s; the publishing industry has far less money to make use of institutions such as the RIAA, and I suspect that the publishing industry is smart enough to realise that suing either your own customers, or people who would never have bought anything anyway, constitutes poor Public Relations.

Ereading devices are about to go mainstream. All of the people getting their new readers will be looking at the prices and availabilty of books online, as well as reading about the disadvantages of DRM employed by the online retailers. These people constitute the majority of the most serious readers in the relatively wealthy parts of the world.

Book publishing and retailing have to engage with ebooks quickly and seriously, deploying fair pricing-structures and getting rid of their DRM. If they don't, the only books they'll be making a profit on will be Christmas coffee-table books and YA / children's fiction. Of course, there will still be a living for writers who reach out to their readership and directly cultivate a relationship with them.

This shift will happen much, much faster than it did for the music industry, and we're on the tipping point right at this moment.

You get it more than most. The thing is we are just beyond another tipping point due to the distributed nature of not only the torrent sites but (and this is only concerning books) but the content as well. For example, on a given torrent site you might find a link to a 1-gig compressed volume of several thousand ebooks, say all of the best scifi and fantasy books ever written. With the way the torrents work, that file is on hundreds of servers/home computers/whatever across the world and in many different jurisdictions. Over the course of a week that file gets downloaded by 10,000 more sharers which (in the way that torrents work) and also uploading to 10,000 more sharers even while they are downloading the initial material. At this point even killing the initial torrents won't do a thing because if even a fraction of those sharers leave the file/torrent as "active" they become another node in the distribution matrix and outnumber the original servers/sharers by a huge margin. The only way to detect this (which Net Neutrality laws can stymie) is with bandwidth spikes (700megs/1.4 gigabytes for a single feature film or 65-80 megabytes for an album, depending on compression method) but unlike with a movie or album where you would detect one of these spikes for each item down or uploaded, you have one spike with the book download and you are done; you have it all (of that category). Deep Packet Inspect doesn't work for books either due to the multitude of ways they are packaged (ebub, mobo, lit, prc, html, .docx (meh) .txt and more) not to mention the strong encryption built into torrent clients today. So if the authorities cannot catch this at the ISP/bandwidth/packet inspection end, they have to try to spoof the trackers and act like downloaders themselves to snag and log the IP addresses of other sharers. The problem with that approach is that these spoofed sites are quickly detected and their IP address is distributed (some automatically) to torrent clients in the form of "block lists" so if a sharer is sharing the book file and someone from that IP comes knocking, the request is ignored and the approach fails.

So the attempts at detection/prevention of distribution are doomed to fail; the final nail in the coffin so to speak is the practicality of storage. By that I mean you would need a server farm and NAS units to store every known song, movie, TV show, or bit of software ever published. This is way out of the reach of most due to expense and administration needs. When it comes to books however you can keep literally every book ever published (and certainly any book you actually care about) on a single USB keychain drive of about 8 gigs or better, available at any corner drug store or supermarket.

It is depressing if you love books and respect authors.

The pruning of the tree I was referring to (aka being smart about stopping it) is more of a divide and conquer approach. What you said about servers in Iran (China, Russia and more) is perfectly true. What would throw a wrench in the machine though is not to go after those server (which will fail due to jurisdictional issues) or go after the button pushers at the other end (which will win Pyrrhic victory at best) but to go after and take down the torrent link aggregation sites that act like a Google for these other servers. If Joe sixpack wanted say 100 ebooks on , oh say mechanical engineering (or whatever) he doesn't have to go to the individual pirate sites to hunt for them; he can just go to any of a hundred aggregators like Torrentz.com and do a search for "mechanical engineering ebook" and in a flash has a list of links to sites that carry a torrent link to a file matching that description. Try it; there is no crime in doing a search and it would blow most peoples minds what is out there.

Two clicks later (and about 80 or so megabytes) there is a package of thousands of dollars worth of mechanical engineering books sitting on his drive. If he leaves the client up overnight for example, he also becomes a distributor to possibly hundred of other people. The point is though if the aggregation sites were taken out of the chain it would move the effort/pain threshold to a new level and where Joe Sixpack had no problem using the above method (because people are basically lazy) he would be less likely to try to keep links to the originating servers in Iran, China, etc which go down and come up all the time. This is the method probably 80pct (SWAG on my part based on other conversations and personal experience) use to acquire anything. For books it would be enough to make most just say screw it, go to Amazon or whatever and purchase a real ebook or three.

[mike_bike_kite]

Originally Posted by JeffCobb

Mike; That is the difficulty with addressing a new audience about a non-trivial issue; if the readers have no point of reference and you jump to the conclusion you leave them confused unless the fundamentals of the discussion are established. By the same token if you go too deep in establishing these same fundamentals and the readers by and large already are aware, it simply becomes tedious for the reader and they still may not get the point. My initial post assumed everyone knew all of fundamentals and the point of the post was implied: Everyone in the media, etc cares more about movie and music piracy than book piracy and book piracy was about the easiest thing out there because unlike music/movies/etc, almost every published work is "out there".

When it became obvious that some/many missed the point (one person oddly inferred that I thought movie piracy was OK) I tried to lay down the thought trail that lead to the conclusion that book piracy was easier and due to a number of factors was almost undetectable. As such it is up to the character of the reader to help support the written word whereas movies/music/software (I always forget that one because in my world, all of my software is free/Open source) has the MPAA/RIAA/BSA etc to help enforce responsible behavior in the consumer. By and large they are ineffective but it is more than anyone does for the authors of books.

I take it you're making a stand against movie piracy then?

I think everyone on an ebook forum has some opinion on ebook piracy ranging from ebook prices are daylight robbery, through why fight the inevitable, to I work in the industry and pirates should be hung. My difficulty was simply trying to work out where you stood on the matter.

Out of curiosity - do you think using open source software takes away the income of honest programmers trying to make a living in a difficult market?

[jeffcobb]

Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite

I take it you're making a stand against movie piracy then?

<face-palm>
I wasn't really taking a stance on that, just trying to contrast the difference in the difficulty of pirating movies vs books. As for the "I wouldn't pay for that movie, it stinks" angle, I am an abhorration in that I love cheezey movies (Ed Wood, Roger Corman, etc) moreso than most of the stuff at the cinema today. Just last night the missus and I were hooting over DeathRace 2000 with David Carradine and a very young Sly Stallone.

I think everyone on an ebook forum has some opinion on ebook piracy ranging from ebook prices are daylight robbery, through why fight the inevitable, to I work in the industry and pirates should be hung. My difficulty was simply trying to work out where you stood on the matter.

Out of curiosity - do you think using open source software takes away the income of honest programmers trying to make a living in a difficult market?

Well to turn your logic back on you, are you inferring that open source developers are dishonest in some fashion? Please please try not to trot out the tired argument about communism.

Once you take the word "honest" out of your question it becomes a little more palatable. I am also in that "difficult market" and find myself more honest than many.

A little dose of reality: most open source software is UNIX-based (read:Linux) and mainstream consumer product software is Windows or Mac based. Yes there is some paid software on UNIX/Linux and there is some open source stuff on Windows/Mac. The stuff I write for my employers stays with them and the stuff I write on my own stays with me unless I decide to open source a particular library or system. What I do with my work on my time is my business as long as I am not taking something that would be useful at work. Most places have documents to sign when you start stating that they own anything you come up with on or off the clock if it intersects with what that company does so I make sure there is an intellectual firewall between work and home.

Anyway since a majority of the working coders out there are slinging Windows (.NET) or Mac code (as opposed to Linux), and what I write for open source is primarily Linux-based, no I don't see what I do as hurting anyone from an employment perspective.

Now from the standpoint of ME being a consumer, we buy about two bits of software a year (usually tax software) but everything else we need is provided by Linux and open-source. Our website, mail server, laptops, other servers I use for experiments all run some flavor of Linux. Yes it is free but it is also IMHO far more dependable than Windows ever was and far less controlling that Windows is now. We play games, do research, etc all on older hardware because a headless box running Linux is cheap to make and cheap to run. THAT is what really helps in this "difficult market". It lets us do more with less and do it reliably. This doesn't work for everyone but it does for us.

No I would say that software piracy does far more to hurt the "honest working programmer" than open source ever will simply because most consumers use Windows and therefore that market is affected by it. There is no piracy in the land of open source. No CALs, not ridiculous DRM, nothing. The bonus for a working programmer is that he/she can get the source to literally any kind of system or application and learn from it; education on the cheap.