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 too have no problem paying for software I use. I just prefer to use no-charge software, as I rarely find for-money software that is better than the no-charge equivalent. If it is not better, why would I pay for no-benefit?
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.
I know I'm in the minority here, but Photoshop is worth every penny to me. I don't upgrade to every version (I usually skip every other one) but I don't steal it, and I certainly don't find GIMP to be an honest substitute. If you dabble in graphics, or are making things for the web, it's fine. If you do some of the things I do, GIMP just doesn't have the workflow or the features yet.
I really don't want to turn this into a holy war, but I have found Photoshop to be an exception to the "the more you pay the worse it is" argument. As a general rule, though, I agree - most everything I use is open-source.
Non-linear video editing is even more so, I feel. I do not do a whole lot of it, but I've discovered that there really is no halfway decent free option (besides iMovie, but that's only 'free' if you bought a mac, and it's incredibly weak)
I don't really do video editing myself, but depending on what level of complexity you need, some of my friends/acquaintances use one or more of: PiTiVi, Kdenlive, LiVES, and Cinerella. Of those, Cinerella is probably the most 'serious' (and also has the highest learning curve).
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)
You are right about Photoshop, but I would argue that Octave is an acceptable, free, and Matlab-compatible substitute for Matlab. I did my entire Masters degree in Octave -- it was good enough for me. (The one thing I know Matlab supports that Octave doesn't is a Matlab-to-C compiler)
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)
True. I guess what I really meant is that if you're using a platform where most everything is free you don't really need to pirate software. Macs, in my opinion, could almost be lumped in with Windows.
My impression is that mac users tend to buy software more often than windows users as a percentage of the whole, at least for small to medium applications. Examples: Textmate, Transmit, Sizeup, Divvy, etc. I highly doubt that would apply to behemoths like photoshop though.
Not that I have any data to back that up, just my general impression.
I am amazed at the amount of trivial mac apps that sell for $20+. OMG, bold font pro and spellcheck+ are on special offer! Culture shock for a Linux user.
This is true, but there are quite a few high quality applications that that kind of culture enables as well. I would gladly pay for an ftp app as nice and polished as Transmit 4 on Linux, but as far as I know one doesn't exist. Not that there isn't great software on Linux, but I enjoy the emphasis placed on design by the Mac community when it comes to the top applications.
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.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I may well be on this - approx Amazon prices.
Win 7 is from about £75 (home/student); Mac OS X 10.6 is from about £25.
With Windows you get all the upgrades free until the next major release. With Mac OS X you pay for point releases and that is the price we see here? I note that Amazon (UK) has OS X 10.5 priced at c.£110.
Mac OS X v10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 themselves are not downloadable updates, they are reference releases, also called upgrades. This means, for example, you can't upgrade from Mac OS X v10.3 to Mac OS X v10.5 via a downloadable installer. Reference releases are available from the Apple Store online, Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Distributors (AAD).
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 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.
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.
There should be a third category for "improperly licensed" software offenders. I find that uses of personal software for commercial purposes is quite common. So not quite piracy but still not 100% legit.
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.)
I don't pirate software because I have no need to. I mostly use my computer for recreational purposes, and all of the software I use is freely available. For professional programs, my employer has covered the cost, so that isn't an issue either. It seems that most regular consumers have no need to actually purchase software as long as they are savvy enough to know about the multitude of free options.
I was really really close to do that since my brother suggested it but then discovered that the FOSS tool Octave runs all my Matlab stuff perfectly. It is only very basic matrix manipulation and calculations though.
I have found Octave to be lacking some aspects, also there is a significant network effect with Matlab, since most of the research groups publish code in Matlab, you gotta have it if you want to compete with them
I actually voted both yes and no, since I do pirate software, but only software I own. I don't consider it piracy, because it doesn't impact anyone's ability to make a living off of it (it usually just saves support costs) but the law sees it differently.
Also I did pirate a game from the early 90's because I couldn't figure out where to send a check.
Actually can't even find the game itself anymore, I'm sure I have it on my hard disk somewhere. Think it was by Eric G. Abel or somesuch. I would very much like to send the guy a check and get a legit key.
"Pirate your own software"? I don't think that would count as piracy. If you own the copyright on it, or own the company that owns the copyright, or run the company that owns the copyright, then surely you can copy it as many times as you want. How could it be possible to view any copying of that as 'piracy'.
One example I’d make is getting dongle-free or CD-free copies of software. This is especially handy for laptop users to get a cracked copy so they wouldn’t risk losing something and getting left high and dry while traveling. This is considered illegal in some jurisdictions. (The DMCA here in the States is somewhat vague, since there’s an accessibility exemption, but it’s never been tested in court for this use case, AFAIK.)
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 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.
When I was a kid, yes, today not at all. As a 14 year old there's no way I could afford Adobe Photoshop, or Visual Studio 6 (or be able to justify the reduced cost versions for a student to my parents). So I downloaded them, and learned to use the software, and how to program C++, and learned the MFC libraries. As an adult I have paid for the full versions, and upgrade versions at least twice for each product. I'm thankful for piracy because if it didn't exist I would be living a completely different life. I think it also worked out for the companies too. My first job was as a graphics designer at a cable station. It was because of my experience with the latest versions of the software that I was able to make a convincing argument to my Superior to upgrade their software suite. When I transitioned into a developer role (which has always been something I'm better at) I was very familiar with Visual C++ and MFC, so I gravitated towards those technologies.
I pirated Photoshop for years as a teenager, until I was good enough with it to get paid as a freelancer. With my first check from a freelance gig, I bought a licensed copy. In this sense, Photoshop paid for itself, but it could not have happened without piracy. These days it may be doable without piracy, since academic versions are more widely available and distributed to schools.
Same here. I manage to do my job fine without anything costing more than 140 bucks - a professional Windows SSH client that support MS CryptoAPI for my day job and VMware Workstation / Fusion are about the most expensive things I've purchased. I avoid Photoshop by using Pixelmator, which I've purchased, and exporting to PSD.
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 used to be, then I gradually transitioned to FLOSS alternatives. Four years ago (I think) I finally ditched my pirated Windows copy and switched to Ubuntu.
Not usually. But I also don't use a whole lot of software to be paid for.
I mean I pay for games and what not, but I do all my coding in stuff like Xcode that is free anyway. Stuff like Adobe Photoshop I have never paid for because it's way too expensive for what I use it for and all the alternatives frankly suck
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 don't need to: most of the stuff I use is open source. When I do need a license for something it's probably produced by a small startup at reasonable prices, so I don't even think about it.
97 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadIn 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.
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.
I really don't want to turn this into a holy war, but I have found Photoshop to be an exception to the "the more you pay the worse it is" argument. As a general rule, though, I agree - most everything I use is open-source.
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)
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)
Not that I have any data to back that up, just my general impression.
Win 7 is from about £75 (home/student); Mac OS X 10.6 is from about £25.
With Windows you get all the upgrades free until the next major release. With Mac OS X you pay for point releases and that is the price we see here? I note that Amazon (UK) has OS X 10.5 priced at c.£110.
From Apple Computer's website, http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1338:
Reference releases; update vs. upgrade
Mac OS X v10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 themselves are not downloadable updates, they are reference releases, also called upgrades. This means, for example, you can't upgrade from Mac OS X v10.3 to Mac OS X v10.5 via a downloadable installer. Reference releases are available from the Apple Store online, Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Distributors (AAD).
However, other than that I almost only use free software at work.
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.
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.
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21E...
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?)
- 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.
Also I did pirate a game from the early 90's because I couldn't figure out where to send a check.
http://downloadgameonline.blogspot.com/2008/08/enchantasy-qu...
Actually can't even find the game itself anymore, I'm sure I have it on my hard disk somewhere. Think it was by Eric G. Abel or somesuch. I would very much like to send the guy a check and get a legit key.
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.
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.
I use Linux and use mostly FOSS software.
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...).
I mean I pay for games and what not, but I do all my coding in stuff like Xcode that is free anyway. Stuff like Adobe Photoshop I have never paid for because it's way too expensive for what I use it for and all the alternatives frankly suck
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.