Yup, agree with pro3carp3 and Curt but I *think* that we're straying into the philosophical realm here in that I don't think that people who use cracks, hacks and serialz are necessarily career criminals but rather people who... ah fuck it. They're thieves and there is no justification for it.
When I can't afford (or won't pay) a vendor's high prices, I look for alternatives (Open Source, shareware, Freeware, Donationware), rather than running a pirated version of something. This is, for want of a better word, a moral decision on my part, because I don't want to be a thief!
My gut tells me that there is a distinction lurking here to be defined but, on balance, I know lots of people who run pirated software and most of them can more than afford (from my perspective - what do I really know about anyone else's finances) to buy the software that they steal - all of them are better off than me (I'm essentially unemployed and a student dealing with mortgage payments and two kids - I'm not doing it alone though...
) and yet I've been asked on a couple of occasions to provide my legitimately purchased registration details so that they can use some software that I use and they like for free. Nice. The really odd thing is that usually they're lookng for the serial for a $30-$80 program, not PaintShop Pro, not Xara Xtreme Pro, not PowerGrep - you get the picture (they run hacks and cracks of PhotoShop, Office, and CorelDraw - i.e. the packages that require activation). For some reason, I can't convince many of them that they are stealing. Why steal Office, for example? OpenOffice is more powerful than most people's requirements - I know PhD candidates using it to collect and analyse genetic and morphological data and to write it all up.
Unfortuantely, software occupies twin spaces right now - it's SEXY and people buy into marketing hype (want to edit your three year old's birthday party snaps? Nothing other than PhotoShop will do) and it's become part of the range of things that people use for self-validation (I have and use PhotoShop, woo hoo. You use PhotoFiltre, sniff). So that it's becoming something that people fewel they need to have in order to keep up with the Jones'...
app - you're right, too. What is a reasonable price? It's like the housing market. Five years ago, I could have bought both halves of a nice, brand new duplex for under $200,000 Cdn. but didn't want to live in a duplex (or be a resident landlord, either). Three years ago, I thought that $179,900 was too much for a nice, solid 1950's post and beam home on a hill overlooking the harbour and the mountains in the background and waited for prices to drop. Last year I paid $211,000 (priced $10,000 below assessed value - owner was military and being posted) for half of an 8 year old duplex! New duplexes run $240,000 and up (for half of the dupex!) and that house I looked at and and passed on in 2004 is back on the market with fresh paint and a new deck for $550,000! Now when I'm looking at real estate in the paper I think "Oh, wow, a single family home for $350,000. What a bargain! Can I come up with the financing?" (the answer to that question is NO - my parents gave my wife and I the mortgage on our place...). My point is that over a five year period my perceptions of what is reasonable to pay for a home have changed DRASTICALLY. Software is the same. There was a time when I dithered about paying $20 for downloadable shareware. Today, anything under $50 seems fair and anything between $50 and $150 can seem reasonable, depending on the software's function...
app - I share your aversion to money. Actually, my real aversion is to the increasing, and alarming, utilization of credit to be able to "have it all and have it now" instead of building toward goals. Part of the problem with this is that I know so many people that have, literally, 20+ credit cards (and growing) and just keep bouncing credit from one card to the other to avoid paying for things. I don't want to live in a duplex but I do for now. I'm barely employed and my wife is a contractor for the school district. We live where we do because if we both lost our jobs tomorrow, we could still make our mortgage and car payments if I went back to my first real job - flipping burgers at McDonalds. We also bought something big enough to accomodate our family and that is comfortable, so if we can't "move up" we're fine right where we are. Don't even get me started about my brother-in-law...
Sorry, folks, long rambling post...
PS LOVE the movie Network. Coincidentally, it was on cable this weekend!
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Seriously, though, they run from oodles of free and opensource offerings through a range of shareware products that seem to run between $10 and $30 (but I'm sure you can pay much more).
