Yahoo! News - Pirate's heaven in Vietnam

Nearly every software title, film and album is available on the streets of this city, which itself is a backwater compared with Saigon. Windows XP sells for 25,000 VN ($1.67), the same as Red Hat Linux. Windows Me is cheaper, but it doesn't sell well. "Buggy," said a woman who ran one of the stores. A disk containing 35 music-compression and recording applications goes for 35,000 VN ($2.33).
Norton appears to have a strong edge over Symantec in terms of market share, and Visual Basic looks to be the toolkit of choice. The folks at Macromedia should be glad to know that Dreamweaver is incredibly popular too.
_____________

This is totally nuts. The Vietnamese govt may think it is doing the right thing but what company is going to invest in Vietnam when you know that if you make anything cool, it will be pirated and stolen. That being said, I read somewhere that outside of North America and Europe, only 1 in 4 copies of software are legal. Does that make us subsidizers of overseas competetion?