The Business Software Alliance may have put it best, in their page on anti-piracy:
"Software is one of the most valuable technologies of the Information Age, running everything from PCs to the Internet. Unfortunately, because software is so valuable, and because computers make it easy to create an exact copy of a program in seconds, software piracy is widespread. From individual computer users to professionals who deal wholesale in stolen software, piracy exists in homes, schools, businesses and government. Software pirates not only steal from the companies that make the software, but with less money for research and development of new software, all users are hurt. That's why all software piracy - even one copy you make for a friend, is illegal."
Software piracy is a serious crime, and one that the Open Source community has been remarkably lax in pursuing and protecting against. This is why Twisted Matrix Laboratories is taking the forefront in Open Source software registration technology.
In order to do your part to prevent the tragedy of unregistered, unlicensed software, all you need to do is visit the Twisted Matrix Labs Licensing and Registration page, and enter your user information to obtain a license key. You can provide us with as much or as little information as you like!
This will produce a plain-text file which you should save as
"twisted-registration" (no quotes, no extension) and drop into
the same folder where you run your twistd server.
It will be automatically recognized by the server upon
startup.
Besides providing you with a license for the use of your Twisted Daemon, a Twisted registration file also provides you with a probably-unique identifier for your Twisted process -- a helpful tool in writing peer-to-peer applications, or assigning distributed database keys. Privacy is important to us, and this ID is never used by Twisted Matrix Labs software for tracking purposes. You need only register once, rather than renegotiating unique IDs upon every run of your peered application.
Registering with a valid e-mail address also gives Twisted Matrix Labs a way to contact you with information about upgrades and services as they become available. (Again, registering with an e-mail address is strictly optional to obtain your license key. If you don't want to receive this information, you don't have to!)
Thank you for doing your part to end the piracy crisis.