By Todd R. Weiss

July 23, 2008 (Computerworld) PORTLAND, Ore. -- Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community. When stolen proprietary software is used by consumers, that's a lost opportunity for open-source software makers to get their own software onto the computer hard drives of new users.

So says Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems Inc. for the OpenOffice.org open-source project, who discussed the phenomenon here at the 10th annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

Spotted here