RacerX
Old Rhapsody User
I couldn't help but notice that a thread had been closed in another section because someone had ask where they could get a pre-release version of a piece of software. As the eager young moderator said when closing the thread: "We dont support stealing any thing, let alone pirating products..." Which is an interesting point. What are the ethics of software use?
I know of many people who have software that they have not paid for. But I seem to have a hard time considering ALL of the uses of them wrong. To explain, let me take a step back from the problem for a moment.
Lets look at what I consider ideal software: Adobe Acrobat. Why, you may ask, is this product so ideal? It is ideal because I have paid for it to make documents that can be ported to almost any platform. More to the point, my documents can be viewed on almost any platform for FREE. Yes, I paid for an application to create my documents, but people who want to read my documents get an application to read them for free. That is important to me because I don't feel that people should have to pay $250+ for the full version of an application just to read a document.
Lets look at what I consider Information Super Highway robbery: QuarkXPress and Microsoft Word. Both of these products enjoy almost total market dominance and saturation. What does this mean for your average person wanting to read a document? The latest version of QuarkXPress is running $700+ and Word is at some $350+ for the Mac OS X version. So if I don't use either of these applications to create documents (seeing as I own/paid for both Aldus PageMaker 5 and AppleWorks 6, which let me do all that I could want), why should I pay over $1000 for both so I can read documents sent to me in those formats? Yes I know AppleWorks can open Word docs, but we could have substituted in PowerPoint for Word, and not everyone has AppleWorks (I would not have paid to get AppleWorks considering that TextEdit actually does everything I need from a word processor, but it came with my system which is pre Mac OS X anyway).
Okay, lets get back to the people who have software that they haven't paid for. I know of one person who has QuarkXPress installed on their system for no other reason than to check that the final product (make by someone else) is what they want. They don't even know how to create a new document (less than type) in QuarkXPress. Should a software company hold this person hostage for $700+ so that they can look at maybe 4 documents a year? And in the case of Microsoft Office, Microsoft makes a free reader for Word for Windows, but no other platform, so should we as Mac Users have to pay $350+ because others assume that everyone has Word installed on their system? There are other examples, like prepess houses charging more for file formats other than QuarkXPress.
What it really comes down to is that it would be far easier as a community to enforce a buy your software stance if software makers didn't force people to cross the line on the little things. I would bet that Acrobat is the least pirated software around because it is the one software the has an almost completely cross platform free reader. I for one felt no pain in paying for Acrobat, and have no problem (now that there is a OS X native version) paying for the next upgrade. And when a new design station for one of my clients needed a new version of QuarkXPress ASAP, I had no problem running to the Apple Store and paying $900+ (of someone else's money) to get a copy. But when I see someone crossing that line, the only thing that makes a large amount of difference to me is the question of create vs read (and to a smaller degree, education vs professional use, but I digress). I'm a strong believer in free access to information, and file format censorship is a very real problem for everyone when we let monopolies exist unchecked (like Microsoft Office and QuarkXPress).
Free Readers for ALL...
...and lets try to get some of those prices down too!
I know of many people who have software that they have not paid for. But I seem to have a hard time considering ALL of the uses of them wrong. To explain, let me take a step back from the problem for a moment.
Lets look at what I consider ideal software: Adobe Acrobat. Why, you may ask, is this product so ideal? It is ideal because I have paid for it to make documents that can be ported to almost any platform. More to the point, my documents can be viewed on almost any platform for FREE. Yes, I paid for an application to create my documents, but people who want to read my documents get an application to read them for free. That is important to me because I don't feel that people should have to pay $250+ for the full version of an application just to read a document.
Lets look at what I consider Information Super Highway robbery: QuarkXPress and Microsoft Word. Both of these products enjoy almost total market dominance and saturation. What does this mean for your average person wanting to read a document? The latest version of QuarkXPress is running $700+ and Word is at some $350+ for the Mac OS X version. So if I don't use either of these applications to create documents (seeing as I own/paid for both Aldus PageMaker 5 and AppleWorks 6, which let me do all that I could want), why should I pay over $1000 for both so I can read documents sent to me in those formats? Yes I know AppleWorks can open Word docs, but we could have substituted in PowerPoint for Word, and not everyone has AppleWorks (I would not have paid to get AppleWorks considering that TextEdit actually does everything I need from a word processor, but it came with my system which is pre Mac OS X anyway).
Okay, lets get back to the people who have software that they haven't paid for. I know of one person who has QuarkXPress installed on their system for no other reason than to check that the final product (make by someone else) is what they want. They don't even know how to create a new document (less than type) in QuarkXPress. Should a software company hold this person hostage for $700+ so that they can look at maybe 4 documents a year? And in the case of Microsoft Office, Microsoft makes a free reader for Word for Windows, but no other platform, so should we as Mac Users have to pay $350+ because others assume that everyone has Word installed on their system? There are other examples, like prepess houses charging more for file formats other than QuarkXPress.
What it really comes down to is that it would be far easier as a community to enforce a buy your software stance if software makers didn't force people to cross the line on the little things. I would bet that Acrobat is the least pirated software around because it is the one software the has an almost completely cross platform free reader. I for one felt no pain in paying for Acrobat, and have no problem (now that there is a OS X native version) paying for the next upgrade. And when a new design station for one of my clients needed a new version of QuarkXPress ASAP, I had no problem running to the Apple Store and paying $900+ (of someone else's money) to get a copy. But when I see someone crossing that line, the only thing that makes a large amount of difference to me is the question of create vs read (and to a smaller degree, education vs professional use, but I digress). I'm a strong believer in free access to information, and file format censorship is a very real problem for everyone when we let monopolies exist unchecked (like Microsoft Office and QuarkXPress).
Free Readers for ALL...
...and lets try to get some of those prices down too!
