[Ocean]

Originally Posted by Zachery

I am not speaking for jelsoft, just thinking that way, the music industry is a multibillion dollar industry, Jelsoft is a small company, all forms of piracy hurt us much greater than copying a few MP3's.

I'll put in my two cents here.


Software developers love to talk about how much piracy ruins them. But they rarely want to admit how much piracy actually helps them.


Developers get a large amount of free advertising for their software through piracy. Not only that, it's also advertising that carries with it an inherent vouching. People don't bother to pirate crap. There might be 20 different companies making 20 different versions of a particular type of software. The two or three versions that Pirate groups bother to hack are most likely to be the best. People know this - and they use this fact to help them narrow their choices to the best of the bunch. Looking at it in that light, it's an honor for vBulletin to be so prominent among hackers - you don't see too much of the competition, do you?

In addition, pirated software is typically made and circulated among industry-involved people. In other words, you'll find a lot more computer consultants and IT personnel working with pirated apps than you will farmers. This means that many of the people who work with pirated apps are inherently in the best position to recommend these same products for purchase in the companies or clients that they work with/for.

Personally, I can tell you that I have come across a lot of pirated applications (if nothing else, a lot of my clients install them - and I have to deal with them). As such, I have had exposure to applications that normally cost $5,000 - $20,000. These applications are well beyond my ability to purchase. But having had exposure to pirated versions of them, I can now give genuine recommendations and purchasing advice to companies who ask me to tell them what to buy.

In addition, I have seen some of these pirated apps and bought them myself. These are applications that I would never have purchased were it not for a previously existing pirated copy. Incidentally, vBulletin is one such app.

When Adobe Photoshop first came out, people were swapping and sharing the install disks like crazy. Adobe knew about it - and do you know what they did? Absolutely nothing. It was giving them exposure in a way that they couldn't *pay* for. Not only was the word being spread that there was a great new application on the market - but people were also gaining proficiency on those pirated copies. This meant that the market was starting to be filled by people who knew how to use this software and could genuinely recommend them to the companies they worked for.


Developers love to talk about how much money they're losing to piracy. But the fact is that a person looking to improve their marketable skills and obtains a pirated version of Avid SoftImage (for example) will most likely have never been able to afford it on their own (how many people have $10,000 to shuck on a whim?). So, just what money is Avid losing? If this person could not have obtained a pirated version, they wouldn't have bought it anyway. Zero money lost to Avid.

However, by obtaining that pirated version, they become acquainted with it, learn it - and now, when their company is looking for a 3D Animation solution, this person can speak up and say "Hey, I've worked with Avid SoftImage. It's a GREAT program, and I know how to use it". Boom - a sale made, and $10,000 in the bank for Avid, who otherwise might never have seen that money - as the company in question might have chosen a competitor's product if left to their own devices.


So, I will say that piracy can do both good AND bad things for companies. It's rare for developers to acknowledge this - but that doesn't make it false.