Honestly, with the exception of a few things work pays for (and I don't need outside of work -- looking at you outlook calendar), I have no need for any software that isn't (legally) freely available. If I owned a mac myself, I would consider buying a copy of omnigraffle, but, again, I don't ever have use cases for it outside of work...
In fact, when I have bought software in the past, I have ended up pretty disappointed with it. Most recently, I was having hard drive issues (fat fingered a partition delete on the wrong drive). At a friends suggestion I bought eazeus to recover it. This $50 purchase was a giant waste of money, and did nothing to fix it. Later another friend pointed me at a free tool (testdisk) that did fix it. This seems to be the common experience for me -- pay software is way over hyped and under performing.
Does this ring true for anyone else? Is there some magic software out there that is worth the money in personal life any more?
Aside: exception to all of the above is video games. I have no problem buying the occasional game.
I have felt this way for a long time: In general, the more you pay for software, the worse it is (this is why anything with the word 'Enterprise' in the title frightens me). Note: I don't play many games, so this may not apply to them.
It is true, there is a lot of throwaway software out there. Things are complicated even more when the free stuff is better than the paid stuff (Imgburn anyone?) Just about the only miscellaneous 3rd party software I have paid for in recent memory was mIRC, because no other IRC client for Windows ever satisfied me and I found a discount worth $10. Essentially, there is no little 'killer app' I have found that just magically fills my computer world with unicorns and rainbows, or frankly was even worth using.
The real pillars of software though- Photoshop, Matlab, Orcad, and so on- accept no substitutes (well, except for possibly their direct competitors). Maybe it's a result of the sky-high pricing, but they generally really are good (and even if they aren't perfect, they are still the best)
I think one factor is that the piracy scene isn't as closely connected to the hacker/maker scene as it used to be. In the 70s/80s, copy-protection cracking attracted a lot of curious hacker types as a sort of challenge problem, and lots of hackers got their start in low-level programming by stepping through a game or an app in a debugger. I think at one point all the best freely available x86 asm tutorials were written by cracking groups, so even people not really into that sort of thing would come across it as just part of the culture; it wasn't at all unusual for even legit educational textfiles to be signed with a fancy ASCII signature and 'greetz' to various handles and groups.
The demoscene came from there as well: demos were originally graphical eyecandy inserted into cracked software, and for years, cracking groups and demo groups were either the same, or had huge overlap in membership. So if you were to hang out at a HackerNews BBS in 1980 or 1990, I think there'd be a lot more rubbing shoulders with people who spent their free time cracking software and operating pirate BBSs, because they were the same people building cool things and writing the BBS equivalent of tech blog posts.
There's a weird convergence going on here. I'm an old fogey now (34) and it seems that everyone younger than me has little to no respect for intellectual property rights. From their perspective, downloading a movie using Bittorrent is not ethically any different than renting it from Blockbuster.
At the same time, so many good things are either free or bundled with the hardware so you don't feel the marginal cost of them. You don't "need" to pirate MS Office to have a usable computer, OO and Google Docs are pretty damn good these days.
A lot of gaming has moved to consoles (much harder to pirate) or online subscriptions like WOW or Steam, which also make piracy more difficult.
And yes, when I say I don't pirate software, I include fonts in that list. There are plenty of good free fonts, and many great fonts are pretty affordable.
I pirate software I legally own because their "protection" makes it hard or impossible for me to run them otherwise. It starts with games on Wine, goes over a certain operating system (whose company I do not want to call each time )in VirtualBox and ends with games on Windows that want to install what I call malware.
I really only use free software. Outside of software development I don't really have any other software on my laptops. I have purchased tools and never pirate them. Is pirating more of a Windows user's thing?
No. I know many designer/Mac folk that have never paid for any Adobe software in their lives and they pride themselves on each CS update so they can play with new brushes in Photoshop. (Okay I'm being a bit sensationalist.. CS5 Photoshop does bring in some pretty nifty content aware features)
I think culture does play a part, and reasonable pricing. It's easy for someone to justify pirating windows, especially if it's not their main operating system compared with OSX which is at a price point that no one but a broke teenager would really consider pirating it.
Perhaps, but when I was a kid I used Linux and pirated Loki games, Transgaming, proprietary OSS drivers, VMware, and other bits and pieces. I'm clean now :^)
I'm a member of BizSpark and am developing for SharePoint inside VMWare images. BizSpark provided me with a set of licenses for Windows Server 2008 R2, but it's only really enough to build 1 whole environment (1 server license). As a result I've simply copied/branched my VMWare image so that I can have 2 instances, a dev and a test environment. The test being a snapshot of dev prior to installation of Visual Studio.
I suspect this is pirating because now I have 2 machines available from 1 licence, but then again... it's just an image of the same machine, still running on the same physical machine and really just represents an earlier snapshot of the dev machine.
Something's wrong when it's not simple enough to know whether you are or not, and when a developer program (BizSpark) doesn't really give you enough to do the job you need.
I can admit to this, to be honest the workload that it gets from me is resizing images and as a colour picker, obviously there is no reason I couldn't use virtually anything for this, just had it sitting there for a long time and got used to going to it for any very basic image task I run into.
I've actually done more advanced stuff in Paint.Net which I was using for a couple of weeks in an intern position to touch up some website images.
The last non-freely-licensed software I actually wanted to use was Mac OS X 10.2. These days if I can't modify it, I'm not interested. That said, I've paid money for several free software projects since then. (Clojure, Rails, CyanogenMod, and a plugin to let me use skype from Pidgin.)
When I was a lot younger, yeah. Now? Open source has priced most everything out of the market for me. My databases are MySQL, my operating system is OpenBSD (except on stuff provided by work), my web server is apache (although I keep meaning to try out nginx), I code in python, mail is postfix/courier-imapd, ftp is vsftpd...
For any DTP stuff, I use GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus.
Looking at my desktop, the only commercial software that I have up is dameware mini remote control; I don't know of a good free alternative for this and yes, I paid for it.
I guess that, to me, there isn't really much worth pirating out there. Dameware, I guess, but they actually will give me a free trial for pretty much ever and bug me to buy it until I do.
I am a student and a hobbyist. Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Maya and Sony Forge are examples of great software that I really want to use and love to use, but simply could never afford as a student. I'd add Windows 7 and the Office pack to the list, if my school didn't offer free licenses for them.
And to be honest, even if I was making decent money and using those tools as a pro, I'd still only pay for the software if I had a reason to believe that someone was angry at me and might rat on me. Actually, even then I'd rather install a self-destruct mechanism on my workstation and encrypt my hard drives.
I'm not trying to boycot anything either. I think it's a good thing that developers get paid for making good software.
Piracy is just so easy and care free, that the only pressure not to do it comes from within yourself, if it comes at all. The question is no longer "Is this right? Am I being a good person?", where you reflect on yourself trough popular morality, but rather a personal two part question of "Do I want this product?" and "Do I want to give away my money?". The answers are "Yes" and "No", and in my mind the questions are totally unrelated to each other. Paying for software would feel like flushing the money down the toilet when it's actually easier to just download it.
PS: In the end, if I had to pretend that I cared, I could honestly say that I believe I would be generating more wealth for the world when I am allowed to concentrate on creating and learning instead of concentrating on worrying about money and working at McDonald's to pay for my Photoshop license.
When I was younger: Yes. Games, software, videos, etc..
Now: No on software. No on games. Besides the risk of virii, you dont get things like updates or patches. Its not worth it.
However, I still do actively download TV Shows + Movies occasionally. Its not because I wouldnt pay though, but moreso because there is no other ways to watch them from home.
Same as many others here. Copied a lot of stuff when I was a teenager (had 200+ floppies of BBS warez - those were the days...). Now I migrated to Linux completely and I don't really need any commercial apps. I buy some games once in a while though (World of Goo lately) and some music CDs.
These days I see the problem games producers face: When I wanted to play games, my parents would have to buy me one, and they wouldn't be keen to do that. Now that I'd happily buy a game which I really like, I'm not interested anymore.
The other problem is about apps - it's in company's best interest to give me (for example) a copy of Visual Studio as soon as I say I'm interested in it. Since I couldn't get it, I learned on djgpp and migrated to Linux as soon as I could. Now you can get new VS from MSDNA program at universities - I think it's still way too late.
Not anymore. Early in college I pirated a ton of software and used almost none of it. Mid-college I started using linux and shortly after just stuck with free software.
I can afford to buy expensive software now but the truth is I don't really need much fancy software to get things done.
Other than a copy of XP i use about 2 hours a week to play some crappy game(for which i also didn't pay), i don't pirate software. Everything i need is either an apt-get install or a git clone away.
I'm living on the road right now off of a laptop, so I don't carry much physical media with me. If I wipe my hardcore and do a clean install, I download all the software kit that I use - most of which I've owned physical copies of at various points. I have pirated some crazy high-end software occasionally to play with. (Hmm, I hope I didn't just admit to committing grand theft copyright)
I used to buy my games, after buying one copy I'd download it if I wanted it again, I just didn't like having physical media around. I'm off video games probably for the rest of my life so I haven't tried Steam, but it looks like a good solution for gamers. I know I bought Baldur's Gate once or twice, and then re-downloaded it from Napster or Kazaa or whatever a couple more times. I must've bought three or four copies of Final Fantasy VIII for the Playstation and later Playstation 2 after moving, lending them out and not getting them back, or whatever. Great game if you delve into it, the mechanics system on it is very enjoyable if you decide to play it a deeper level, probably the most enjoyable Final Fantasy for me, though Final Fantasy X was the last one I played, that was kind of the swan song for video games for me.
Who knows, if I have a massive exit or reach some vast milestones, maybe I'll take a one month vacation where I catch up with a decade or two of video games and play the new Grand Theft Autos, Oblivion, Mass Effect, things like that. I wind up hearing about all that stuff secondhand and it does look pretty enjoyable. I'll probably play team-based shooters and strategy games with my future kids later, I'm actually quite excited about the idea of doing that.
My country (Uruguay) has some retarded laws that means that even if you purchase a valid copy of a software program from the US it's not a "legal" copy (my father found out the hard way that the Norton license he had bought in the US was not "legal").
And no, there are no legal ways to buy several programs - meanwhile piracy is unofficially tolerated by the government (there are shops that sell pirated versions of games and other software - not MS stuff or other companies with local presence). I do have every Microsoft program I use legally for instance (as they are available locally).
There are also several other grievances (think DVD region selection and all that) which strongly discourage purchasing software.
I tend to believe that I wouldn't have any illegal program if I lived in the US.
Edit: fittingly, I've had a (legal) copy of a game I purchased for a friend just detained at customs (used to be you could make small purchases without it winding up at customs, but it isn't so anymore). So some very nice paperwork and fees coming up - just for trying to be legal.
I'm not sure if Steam is legal here, but I wouldn't bet for it (it's probably a gray area and it should be OK)
[+] [-] sophacles|15 years ago|reply
In fact, when I have bought software in the past, I have ended up pretty disappointed with it. Most recently, I was having hard drive issues (fat fingered a partition delete on the wrong drive). At a friends suggestion I bought eazeus to recover it. This $50 purchase was a giant waste of money, and did nothing to fix it. Later another friend pointed me at a free tool (testdisk) that did fix it. This seems to be the common experience for me -- pay software is way over hyped and under performing.
Does this ring true for anyone else? Is there some magic software out there that is worth the money in personal life any more?
Aside: exception to all of the above is video games. I have no problem buying the occasional game.
[+] [-] yozhik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
The real pillars of software though- Photoshop, Matlab, Orcad, and so on- accept no substitutes (well, except for possibly their direct competitors). Maybe it's a result of the sky-high pricing, but they generally really are good (and even if they aren't perfect, they are still the best)
[+] [-] shin_lao|15 years ago|reply
If I see a software I like, I pay for it if I have to.
I find that perfectly acceptable (eg to pay for software I use). Software is expensive to make.
[+] [-] neilk|15 years ago|reply
Guessing about reasons... what do you all think?
- Software moved to the web and is funded by subscriptions, advertising, corporate behemoths, donations, or mere hope.
- Free software answers a lot of people's needs, especially on HN.
- Operating systems are good enough that we don't need a lot of random utilities.
- Shareware and $10 utility programs just aren't being written these days, because they'd be instantly pirated.
(By the way, when you guys say you don't pirate software, does that include fonts?)
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
The demoscene came from there as well: demos were originally graphical eyecandy inserted into cracked software, and for years, cracking groups and demo groups were either the same, or had huge overlap in membership. So if you were to hang out at a HackerNews BBS in 1980 or 1990, I think there'd be a lot more rubbing shoulders with people who spent their free time cracking software and operating pirate BBSs, because they were the same people building cool things and writing the BBS equivalent of tech blog posts.
[+] [-] msmith|15 years ago|reply
- Many of us produce and sell software and we understand that pirating makes it harder for people like us to make a living at it.
[+] [-] MartinCron|15 years ago|reply
At the same time, so many good things are either free or bundled with the hardware so you don't feel the marginal cost of them. You don't "need" to pirate MS Office to have a usable computer, OO and Google Docs are pretty damn good these days.
A lot of gaming has moved to consoles (much harder to pirate) or online subscriptions like WOW or Steam, which also make piracy more difficult.
And yes, when I say I don't pirate software, I include fonts in that list. There are plenty of good free fonts, and many great fonts are pretty affordable.
[+] [-] aw3c2|15 years ago|reply
I use Linux and use mostly FOSS software.
[+] [-] lanstein|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reynolds|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PStamatiou|15 years ago|reply
No. I know many designer/Mac folk that have never paid for any Adobe software in their lives and they pride themselves on each CS update so they can play with new brushes in Photoshop. (Okay I'm being a bit sensationalist.. CS5 Photoshop does bring in some pretty nifty content aware features)
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nailer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvalle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|15 years ago|reply
I'm a member of BizSpark and am developing for SharePoint inside VMWare images. BizSpark provided me with a set of licenses for Windows Server 2008 R2, but it's only really enough to build 1 whole environment (1 server license). As a result I've simply copied/branched my VMWare image so that I can have 2 instances, a dev and a test environment. The test being a snapshot of dev prior to installation of Visual Studio.
I suspect this is pirating because now I have 2 machines available from 1 licence, but then again... it's just an image of the same machine, still running on the same physical machine and really just represents an earlier snapshot of the dev machine.
Something's wrong when it's not simple enough to know whether you are or not, and when a developer program (BizSpark) doesn't really give you enough to do the job you need.
[+] [-] lhnz|15 years ago|reply
However, other than that I almost only use free software at work.
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
I've actually done more advanced stuff in Paint.Net which I was using for a couple of weeks in an intern position to touch up some website images.
[+] [-] technomancy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blhack|15 years ago|reply
For any DTP stuff, I use GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus.
Looking at my desktop, the only commercial software that I have up is dameware mini remote control; I don't know of a good free alternative for this and yes, I paid for it.
I guess that, to me, there isn't really much worth pirating out there. Dameware, I guess, but they actually will give me a free trial for pretty much ever and bug me to buy it until I do.
[+] [-] steiger|15 years ago|reply
I am willing to pay for every proprietary software that:
- Has no good free alternative
- Pricing is not abusive
If there's no good free or even paid alternative and pricing is abusive, I don't hesitate to pirate it.
I also proudly share other copyrighted media (music, videos...).
[+] [-] juxtaposition|15 years ago|reply
And to be honest, even if I was making decent money and using those tools as a pro, I'd still only pay for the software if I had a reason to believe that someone was angry at me and might rat on me. Actually, even then I'd rather install a self-destruct mechanism on my workstation and encrypt my hard drives.
I'm not trying to boycot anything either. I think it's a good thing that developers get paid for making good software.
Piracy is just so easy and care free, that the only pressure not to do it comes from within yourself, if it comes at all. The question is no longer "Is this right? Am I being a good person?", where you reflect on yourself trough popular morality, but rather a personal two part question of "Do I want this product?" and "Do I want to give away my money?". The answers are "Yes" and "No", and in my mind the questions are totally unrelated to each other. Paying for software would feel like flushing the money down the toilet when it's actually easier to just download it.
PS: In the end, if I had to pretend that I cared, I could honestly say that I believe I would be generating more wealth for the world when I am allowed to concentrate on creating and learning instead of concentrating on worrying about money and working at McDonald's to pay for my Photoshop license.
[+] [-] junkbit|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yaggo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weaksauce|15 years ago|reply
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21E...
[+] [-] pclark|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xist|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBlake|15 years ago|reply
Now: No on software. No on games. Besides the risk of virii, you dont get things like updates or patches. Its not worth it.
However, I still do actively download TV Shows + Movies occasionally. Its not because I wouldnt pay though, but moreso because there is no other ways to watch them from home.
[+] [-] viraptor|15 years ago|reply
These days I see the problem games producers face: When I wanted to play games, my parents would have to buy me one, and they wouldn't be keen to do that. Now that I'd happily buy a game which I really like, I'm not interested anymore.
The other problem is about apps - it's in company's best interest to give me (for example) a copy of Visual Studio as soon as I say I'm interested in it. Since I couldn't get it, I learned on djgpp and migrated to Linux as soon as I could. Now you can get new VS from MSDNA program at universities - I think it's still way too late.
[+] [-] naner|15 years ago|reply
I can afford to buy expensive software now but the truth is I don't really need much fancy software to get things done.
[+] [-] rmc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavelludiq|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
I used to buy my games, after buying one copy I'd download it if I wanted it again, I just didn't like having physical media around. I'm off video games probably for the rest of my life so I haven't tried Steam, but it looks like a good solution for gamers. I know I bought Baldur's Gate once or twice, and then re-downloaded it from Napster or Kazaa or whatever a couple more times. I must've bought three or four copies of Final Fantasy VIII for the Playstation and later Playstation 2 after moving, lending them out and not getting them back, or whatever. Great game if you delve into it, the mechanics system on it is very enjoyable if you decide to play it a deeper level, probably the most enjoyable Final Fantasy for me, though Final Fantasy X was the last one I played, that was kind of the swan song for video games for me.
Who knows, if I have a massive exit or reach some vast milestones, maybe I'll take a one month vacation where I catch up with a decade or two of video games and play the new Grand Theft Autos, Oblivion, Mass Effect, things like that. I wind up hearing about all that stuff secondhand and it does look pretty enjoyable. I'll probably play team-based shooters and strategy games with my future kids later, I'm actually quite excited about the idea of doing that.
[+] [-] GFischer|15 years ago|reply
And no, there are no legal ways to buy several programs - meanwhile piracy is unofficially tolerated by the government (there are shops that sell pirated versions of games and other software - not MS stuff or other companies with local presence). I do have every Microsoft program I use legally for instance (as they are available locally).
There are also several other grievances (think DVD region selection and all that) which strongly discourage purchasing software.
I tend to believe that I wouldn't have any illegal program if I lived in the US.
Edit: fittingly, I've had a (legal) copy of a game I purchased for a friend just detained at customs (used to be you could make small purchases without it winding up at customs, but it isn't so anymore). So some very nice paperwork and fees coming up - just for trying to be legal.
I'm not sure if Steam is legal here, but I wouldn't bet for it (it's probably a gray area and it should be OK)