Comments on: Real Reason I Avoid Pirated Software

By: Keri Schwald

Keri Schwald — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:05:21 +0000

Cracks are good for gaming without cd.

By: Jean-Marc

Jean-Marc — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:31:50 +0000

To me the reason for not using cracked software should be to support alternative development, and particularly open source development. As long as people keep on using cracked versions of e.g. Adobe InDesign, it maintains its position as the de-facto industry standard and support that would have gone elsewhere, like to Scribus, is lost.
The big developers are very two-faced: they know some people can’t afford their overpriced wares, yet still crackdown on something which keeps their product in standard use. Let’s face it, it’s only a certain number of people with the patience and ability to find, download, rebuild, install with sometimes complicated cracks and patches, that even use hacked software.

By: eldris

eldris — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:52:56 +0000

I think a lot of people get caught out with pirated/cracked software. Sometimes they will work fine, but that’s of course if you haven’t downloaded a virus by mistake and got your computer infected. I won’t go near software on peer2peer programs, legal or otherwise, because it’s nearly always a virus of some kind.

Some though will always work fine. Those tend to be the ones where you are provided with a keygen crack rather than the program itself being hacked to remove the activation process.

I certainly don’t condone piracy, but a lot of software developers bring it on themselves by charging so much for the software, such as Adobe with Photoshop. Also games companies that force you to load with the disk in even though you don’t technically need it.

By: Eric Lamb

Eric Lamb — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:29:54 +0000

It’s funny you mentioned games because cracked games were what initially turned me off. I’d spend all the time downloading a game and when I would attempt to play it the game would be super buggy and unstable. This was a few years ago though so maybe the scene has improved; I don’t know.

Yeah, I heard about Sony installing rootkits on peoples computers. Pretty dumb of them IMHO. I still have a Korn CD I’ve never ripped because of this.

From a moral position I honestly have no issue with a person (not a company) using cracked or pirated software from the likes of Adobe or M$. I do have a problem when people crack programs for the smaller, niche, programs like EditPlus or RegexBuddy.

Hypocritical? Totally.

The way I see it; a person (who’s not using the program for profit) is more often than not using their personal version to become familiar with the program so they can use it professionally. The company they work for then pays for a valid copy.

Besides; the cost of CS4 isn’t practical for an individual ($650 last I checked) unlike EditPlus ($35) .

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:45:29 +0000

I think some games actually have the opposite problem. By using cracked versions you can avoid nasty DRM crap on your computer. It’s funny that their copy protection is a reason to pirate.

Buying a Sony CD a few years back was much worse for your computer than just downloading a illegal mp3.

That said, as a software developer, it’s pretty immoral to steal others peoples’ work.