What is the cost of software piracy in Bangladesh? The latest survey by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics in 2023 showed that 3.6 million Bangladeshi households owned computers. Given the widespread use of pirated software in the country, it can be assumed that practically all of these are running pirated copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.
The cost of a license of Microsoft Office family edition is Tk 9,599 per year, and the cost of Adobe Photoshop is Tk 66,715 per year. That means that the total amount payable for domestic use of these two products alone in households is (Tk9,599 + 66,715) x 3.6 million = Tk274.73 billion (an astronomical US $2.2 billion) per year.
Bangladesh is close to being declared a middle-income country, which means that it can expect greater pressure from US trade authorities to respect the Intellectual Property Rights of American companies like Microsoft and Adobe. According to Bangladesh's Copyright Act, software piracy is in fact illegal and is supposed to be stopped; it’s just a question of when this will happen.
But the fact is that paying such a huge bill for software is out of the question. To put the numbers in perspective, the annual bill calculated above for pirated MS Office and Adobe Photoshop use in Bangladesh is about ten times our annual export of IT and software products.
There are further unseen costs to be incurred if we don’t act to remove software piracy. Multinational software companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have invested heavily in countries like India, creating thousands of high-paid jobs and a world-class IT industry there. By comparison, Bangladesh has received an insignificant amount of foreign investment in the software and IT industry.
One reason is that the primary assets that software and technology companies seek to build is intellectual property; this means that it’s infeasible for them to invest in countries like Bangladesh where a cursory inspection of any market will reveal many shops selling pirated software DVDs. If we want a big software/IT industry, we have to respect the intellectual property rights of that industry; this is currently a big failure of the environment in which our software and IT industry operates.
Fortunately, there is an affordable alternative. Our company, Kazi Farms, has removed pirated softwares from all our 1000+ computers by replacing them with open-source alternatives that are developed collaboratively by teams of programmers around the world and free to use by anyone.
Bangladesh is close to being declared a middle-income country, which means that it can expect greater pressure from US trade authorities to respect the Intellectual Property Rights
Instead of Microsoft Windows, Kazi Farms uses the free/open-source LinuxMint operating system, which comes with the LibreOffice word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, all of which are compatible with MS Office files. It also includes the free, open-source Gimp photo editor -- which is a capable replacement of Adobe Photoshop for most users; the Thunderbird email client and the Firefox web browser.
These free/open-source solutions have been designed to be easy to use, and each generally only require a few minutes of training for people migrating from common pirated alternatives.
Migrating from pirated to free/open-source software like Linux has the side effect of greatly improving cyber-security, which should be a priority of the government to prevent future hacking incidents. This is because pirated copies of software like Microsoft Windows can’t get security updates and are vulnerable to hackers -- unless one pays for expensive software licenses. Free/open-source software like Linux has no license fee, and every Linux computer, by default, regularly gets all security updates required to keep it secure.
Across the world, many governments and large companies have already moved from expensive proprietary solutions to free/open-source software to stop software piracy, reduce costs, and increase cyber-security. It’s time for Bangladesh to do the same.
Fortunately, Bangladesh already has plenty of Linux-certified system administrators working in the IT departments of many public and private organizations; these individuals simply need to be asked to train and support regular users to migrate from pirated to free/open-source software. It only requires some informed decision-making at top levels of organizations.
Zeeshan Hasan is a director of Kazi Farms Group and Kazi Media, the company behind Deepto TV. He is also the managing director of Sysnova.
