" i know you wrote this program in your basement, and made dozens of copies, your not even a real business"
somehow, only a corporation was legitimate enough to develop a program, and expect to profit, indies were somehow disqualified from being professional.
My grandmother, an indie educational software dev, bought and brought home to me a collection of 300 floppy disks from Goodwill in 1987, that turned out to be someone’s complete warez collection; each disk had a boot-up index with up to 25 items each, and each program had a crack splash screen. It single-handedly propelled me into a thirty year computing career in a field that academic colleges still don’t teach today. Our family was able to afford two shareware payments in my entire childhood — one was for {COMMO}, from which I learned TUI and Expect scripting — so that 300-disk collection of pirated programs ended up costing the developers nothing, because I never could have afforded them to begin with.
This doesn’t excuse people pirating software when their spending allocations could be reasonably adjusted to afford it, but my family was ‘has a map of local fruit trees and standing agreements with their owners to swap canned fruit for fresh fruit and empty jars from theirs’ so it’s a miracle we ever got ahold of a computer at all. Piracy for piracy’s sake still does get on my nerves as an adult, but I still use it to this day for infrequent (three times in seven years, totaling one hour open time) usage of an industrial program for personal-hobby use that’s only offered at $3000/year subscription pricing. If I went pro, I’d pay for it, just like I did for Photoshop. But that’s an unattainable price for this non-comm, so their lost revenue from my bypass is $0.
" i know you wrote this program in your basement, and made dozens of copies, your not even a real business"
somehow, only a corporation was legitimate enough to develop a program, and expect to profit, indies were somehow disqualified from being professional.
This doesn’t excuse people pirating software when their spending allocations could be reasonably adjusted to afford it, but my family was ‘has a map of local fruit trees and standing agreements with their owners to swap canned fruit for fresh fruit and empty jars from theirs’ so it’s a miracle we ever got ahold of a computer at all. Piracy for piracy’s sake still does get on my nerves as an adult, but I still use it to this day for infrequent (three times in seven years, totaling one hour open time) usage of an industrial program for personal-hobby use that’s only offered at $3000/year subscription pricing. If I went pro, I’d pay for it, just like I did for Photoshop. But that’s an unattainable price for this non-comm, so their lost revenue from my bypass is $0.