Our last meeting was a full-on discussion on Piracy(no buried treasure involved). We discussed how it affects the field we are presently studying so hard for at university and the consequences of actions pertaining to the practice. Dictionary.com gives a solid definition of Piracy as "the unauthorized reproduction [and]/or use of copyrighted [material]/ trademarked product." This practice has become prevalent in the wider society, however, as future programmers and content creators, they were advised to adhere to morals and ethics and deter from doing the underhanded deed.
Being no different than any of our other meetings there were a couple arguments to convince those in attendance of what we can call the "short-term pros" of the act(never said it would be easy to keep the masses on the straight and narrow) and even a few names were thrown out there for good measure(for my own good, going to keep this ...). What we advised mostly was to try and picture oneself in the shoes of those cheated out of their rightful earnings. Also we gave examples of alternatives(freeware, open source) of popular applications that's used everyday.
We were joined by Mr. Colin Francis, Technical Officer in charge of SCIT computing labs and open source aficionado, to talk a bit on his platform of choice, Linux. He gave a lot of the pros to using Linux such as the freedom of getting the applications one would want without the shackles of cost (although he does support the community with contributions) and EULAs along with a bit of history on his computing treks. Also he took the opportunity to rant on his lukewarm experiences with a certain OS which is used by almost everyone on an everyday basis.
Overall, a very good meeting which left everyone thinking. We'll see what we can tackle next week.
