Warez: A discussion

[Cyanide]

Ah yes, I'm the semi-literate fuckstick. But you're the one who can't come up with a more civilized adjective than "fuck" or some derivative of it. You need to calm down son.

I've written software in the past and distributed it under the GPL. I spent countless hours on it and never made a cent. Millions of people do the same thing, and they don't feel robbed. Obviously one person buying a product and everybody else copying it is not what happens with software piracy. If that was the case then there would be no software to pirate. Pirating software even though you can afford it is wrong and that does hurt the company, I never said that it does not. My arrgument was not about that scenario. My argmunet was about people who can't afford the software pirating it. And you've still not given any reason why that hurts anybody. If Ferrari spent years making a car that only 1 person could afford, then they deserve to lose money because that would be stupid and that is bad business. Who cares if a bunch of people copied it. They could only have sold one of the cars anyway. I don't think pirating software that they can afford is right, and I never said I did, so using that scenario to argue with me is pointless.

The bottom line is that people who can buy software usually do. Only a very small percentage pirate software they can afford. Software developers are making more money now than they ever have in the past, dispite P2P technology. So all this about piracy putting companies out of business and keeping them from making profits is just BS. Software companies go under because of bad business practices, over saturation of the market, and poor quality software. Those are the major threats to a software developer. Piracy is not a major threat to any company that makes quality software, has good business practices, and is not in a market that is over saturated. The reason most software developers don't last very long is market saturation. There are simply too many developers out there for all of them to survive.