Bill Gates was in Bucharest on Thursday to celebrate the opening of another Microsoft global technical centre, and the Romanian president Traian Basescu paid the Microsoft boss homage for the value of Windows. Well, paying homage is a lot cheaper than paying for software. Reuters reports:
"Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania," Basescu said during a joint news conference with Gates.
"It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world ...
It's a bit unfair of Gates to take all the credit, of course. The Romanians pirated all the leading applications and games, not just Microsoft's.
Presumably, Basescu also neglected to mention that Romania's world fame for IT skills is rather closely associated with its reputaton as a leading centre for virus writers, hackers, spammers and scammers. For example, it was from Bucharest that criminals stole scientific data from a research center in Antarctica, and threatened to shut down their life-support systems.
But to be fair, Romania has been trying to stop it. As reported by BBC News in 2003:
Computer programmer Varujan Pambuccian, a member of the Romanian Parliament, says that for too long, young computer workers in Romania have thought that hacking and writing viruses was a resume builder, the first step toward landing a well-paying computer security job.
"We're trying to explain to them now that this is not a way of finding better jobs. This is a way of finding better jails."
