Piracy – We can ignore it!

Peace be upon you,
Few days ago I saw a headline on newspaper saying that the piracy in Indonesia has already somewhat terrible. As the largest Muslim country, it's undoubted that this fact is shameful. It's not just songs, movies which are being pirated, but for sure it includes software such as windows and Microsoft office which might be the very common things among us. Well, don't you think that it's wrong to use any piracy stuff or doing piracy itself? To me, I just cannot live and think well if I do it. Why? It is because I have known the risk of committing piracy as well as I know the alternatives of software and things related. The risk, I read somewhere on the net that we Muslims are supposed to respect somebody's properties. Example, we cannot of course steal the pen belongs to somebody who is not Muslim. Though we think that he is disbeliever, we have to still respect him. Even we have to live with him well, respect to each other. If we steal his pen, that means we do not respect him and it'll be counted as a sin. Talking about alternatives, exactly there are lots of free and open sources softwares we can use and emblem in our computers. As a teacher and student, I really only use my computer for mostly typing, browsing, watching, listening and doing little sketching. Indeed I can do all of them by simply using a zero dollar software i.e. Ubuntu. If there is something at-no-cost and pretty easy to use, why are we still using illegal ones? Unless you bought the software, you'd better use any free operating system available out there. What I mentioned above is just one of the countless programs we can use and share with anyone. Something I do to minimize the piracy is by spreading the message of “go open source” to friends and relatives of mine. Praises to Allah that one of my co-workers is now using Ubuntu for his laptop. He does not use pirated Windows anymore. What I did to him was just to give little bit explanation about Ubuntu and I helped him install his computer. Earlier before him, I also installed free softwares on my wife's laptop. Respecting other can be done by not pirating and starting to learn something free such as Ubuntu Linux. If we spend few hours to learn, we can be free from so-called pirating. I am insya Allah willing to help anybody explain or install the free ones.