Do you Legally Purchase your software?

[rhegedus]

new - about $24,850 diff

You can buy a house (OK, it'll be shitty) for that!

Regards,

Rob

[mmmbeer]

I'd have to sa a little of each here but most of the illegal/pirate stuff has been crap anyways. On the flip side, I purchased Ulead DVD MovieFactory2, biggest waste of money EVER. I will NEVER buy another Ulead product nor reccomend them to anyone. They have NO support for their product and when you do call the techs TELL you to use an outside encoder, how much faith is that supposed to give me?

[BJ_M]

new - about $24,850 diff

You can buy a house (OK, it'll be shitty) for that!

Regards,

Rob

not around here .. maybe a used moble home for that is about it ..

[LanEvo7]

$24,850 for a house? What part of the country do you live in? That money could get you a decent car, but a house is out of the picture.

[rhegedus]

There are some really shitty parts of cities in the UK where you could get a house/flat for under £20,000!

Regards,

Rob

[unclerobwpg]

There's obviously alot of arguments for both sides of this issue. I'm a network admin and at my work (and I'm sure others) we're legally bound by local software piracy laws to make sure we have licenses in place for all the software we use, be it os's, office suites, various apps, etc. Both myself(why network admins are also responsible is beyond me - if your boss doesn't want to pay but still use you're basically SOL) & my employer are legally bound to follow these laws. However at home, people don't necessarily feel this liability, after all who knows what you're doing at home except for you. This feeling of security for lack of a better word invites a person to do something that would normally be considered wrong, in this case stealing software. I'll admit to having downloaded some software via file sharing networks, and also a few mp3's here and there, etc. I don't feel guilty and I can sleep at night - seriously if you can't sleep at night knowing you downloaded free software you're way too sensitive and have way too much time on your hands IMHO - Get a life!. One of the listers made a point that alot of software companies provide largely untested software with very little or no tech support and unfortunately this creates an environment where people don't want to waste their money on something that isn't worth it. If a software vendor can't guarantee their software then they shouldn't complain that people are pirating their software. 99% of the time if you downloaded a piece of software if it didn't work out you turfed it - why should you have to pay alot of $$$ for that experience. The software industry is probably the only industry that can boast charging lot's of money to it's customers for unproven/untested software and then on top of that include an end user license agreement saying that they won't be held liable if their product doesn't work as advertised. Utopia isn't a one way street, responsibility needs to exist on both sides of this fence if this problem will ever be resolved and until then I'll keep snoozing 8-10 hours a day after going to work, taking care of my family and if I have some left over time download or should I say beta test some "free" software every now & then.

[leebo]

The software industry is probably the only industry that can boast charging lot's of money to it's customers for unproven/untested software and then on top of that include an end user license agreement saying that they won't be held liable if their product doesn't work as advertised. Utopia isn't a one way street, responsibility needs to exist on both sides of this fence

Touche!

The record industry is another example of this. For years they've produced CD's with one or two songs and filled the rest with crap and then charged $16. And they wonder why so many people download MP3's.