We Need to Replace Pirated Software with Open-Source Before LDC Graduation

Under article 66.1 of the WTO TRIPS agreement, Least Developed Countries (LDCs) like Bangladesh were granted some waivers from the enforcement of intellectual property claims by multi-national companies like Microsoft. 

Bangladesh was originally scheduled to graduate from Least Developed Country status on November 24, two short months away. Fortunately, the UN General Assembly is likely to postpone this date for another 3 years.

This gives us some breathing space to correct the multi-billion dollar liability that we have built up over decades by allowing the widespread use of pirated software, which is a much bigger problem than most people realize.

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics estimated in 2025 that 9.2% of Bangladesh’s households owned a computer. When multiplied by Bangladesh’s estimated 41 million households, that means that there are 3.8 million home computers in Bangladesh.

A US State Department report titled ‘2020 Investment Climate Statements: Bangladesh’ estimated that "90% of business software is pirated." 

Using this figure we might conclude that that some 3.4 million computers have pirated copies of Microsoft Windows and MS Office. Pirated software is by definition not being paid for; but legally, each user has an obligation to pay it.

This means that the country as a whole has an unpaid liability for software to the Microsoft; whenever US trade authorities demand we start paying it, we will have no choice but to comply. So it’s worth calculating the value of our annual software piracy liability.

A web search reveals that MS Windows officially costs about 10,500 Tk per computer for MS Windows 11 Pro; optimistically assuming that the average computer lasts 10 years, that comes to 1,050 Tk/year. Most home computers usually also have Microsoft Office installed, which officially costs about 9,700 Tk/year.

So together just these 2 softwares cost about 1,050 + 9,700 = 10,750 Tk/year per computer. For all the household computers in Bangladesh this comes to 10,750 Tk x 3.42 million = 3,676 crore Tk per year.

These figures are in fact conservative, as I have only considered software piracy by households and ignored the large number of computers owned by businesses.

I have also ignored the widespread piracy of other software like Adobe Photoshop image editor and the Adobe Illustrator drawing tool, which would substantially increase the unpaid software liability substantially.

Bangladesh is about to graduate to middle income country status, and in doing so will be exposed to multiple intellectual property related liabilities that it ignored previously. Software piracy is likely to become one of the hitherto unpaid liabilities which we will suddenly have no option but to pay.

Fortunately, the huge liability of pirated software can easily be brought to zero. All that is required is for everyone to download and install free/open-source software like LinuxMint and LibreOffice  in place of MS Windows and MS Office. 

Companies like Kazi Farms have already migrated over 1,500 computers to Linux and LibreOffice, saving crores of Taka in license fees. 

Our experience is that it takes the average user 15 minutes of training to get used to Linux and another hour to get used to LibreOffice (about 20 minutes each for the word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation modules).

There are many open-source user forums, manuals, and videos which can help anyone train themselves on these softwares, which are actually very similar to their Microsoft alternatives.

The Bangladesh government can encourage the transition to open-source by moving all government computers to Linux and LibreOffice, and by requiring that all government documents be stored in LibreOffice file formats (.odt for documents, .ods for spreadsheets and .odp for presentations) rather than Microsoft Office file formats (.docx, .xlsx and .pptx).

This will ensure that all government documents can be read and edited smoothly in the future without having to purchase MS software licenses. All schools, colleges, and universities should also be encouraged to migrate to open-source software so that students become familiar with these rather than dependent on proprietary solutions.

Kazi Farms has also assisted both Central Women’s University in Dhaka and Kazi Zahural Huq College in Gopalgonj to migrate almost entirely from Windows to Linux. 

It only requires IT support staff to be trained in Linux rather than Windows. Fortunately, many Linux training courses are available from many IT training vendors.

Governments across Europe are undertaking open-source software migrations, even though they can easily afford to pay for proprietary software. Bangladesh should also make this transition to save our hard-earned foreign currency.

Zeeshan Hasan is a director of Kazi Farms Group.