Original Post
In an effort to maintain gainful employment in my economically depressed locality, I have recently added IT Training courses on top of my college education.
The instructor (who makes a few hundred thousand a year from instruction/her personal IT related business exploits) regularly pirates software. She handed out CDRs of the latest Norton System Tools suite to everyone in the class (it had no direct relation to the coursework, and no it wasn't an evaluation copy). She off-handedly mentions all sorts of piracy in her day to day work, and all sorts of piracy that has gone on at former employers. She doesn't talk about it like piracy, but like its normal day-to-day stuff.
The students are no better. Many work in communications and IT at the local military base, and are all dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft users. These guys are on military pay, so there is a clear economic reason (*NOT* an excuse EVER) for the piracy, and they are always swapping disks before class starts.
Now, the industry when it talks to the news media makes like kids and teenagers are this huge threat (The BSA is the main exception to this rule; they are always litigating against a number of companies ratted out for using pirated software). The real pirates are those who can't even be bothered to go and buy software; its like they have a religious aversion to doing so. They simply pirate a well-known brand without doing the research and finding out that better software is available for free, at a lesser cost, or free for personal use (almost like people whom only wear Fubu/Nike/Whatever).
On top of all that, my instructor/classmates take my views on the benefits of Open Source/Free Software as "communist". "Why shouldn't people get paid for the software that they write?!?" they all exclaim. I then proceded to tell them that based on the amount of piracy I saw going on in the classroom, that programmers weren't getting paid for their work anyway. That shut them up awfully quick, with the side effect that few speak to me anymore.
I use Linux on the majority of my computers at home (I have 4 cobbled together from parts), and on my main development workstation I have a copy of Windows 2000 Pro and MSVC 6.0, both of which I paid for on my meager full-time-college-student's income. The main reason I use Linux is that I am a person addicted to having lots of machines up at once. Paying for a windows license on all those machines would be prohibitive for me.
The trust of all of this is a question to the gamedev.net community: How do you feel _emotionally_ about software piracy? Its not my intention to post flamebait and get the thread locked, but rather me wondering how we as individuals who create software feel about things. The difference between games (which have more in common with film, literature, and comic books than software) and applications/utilities? In large part due to some marketing strategies and the Open Source/Free Software movements, application and OS software is becoming less and less a commodity... how does this change things? Will it affect games?
-Steven Rokiski
P.S. Should I rat everyone there out to the BSA, so that they'll all get an angry mob of Lawyers/Federal Martials knocking at their doors?
P.S.S. What made me even more pissed off is that all the military guys talked about piracy on-base by their IT and communications guys ON THE JOB as if they were above the laws of this land. The Military being above the laws of the land in any way scares me a _lot_.
P.P.S. I also want to make it clear that these students are mostly in their late 30's early 40's. I'm the youngest guy there at 22. Its not like they're high schoolers or something. They KNOW better.
[edited by - SteevR on October 15, 2003 7:05:07 AM]
[edited by - SteevR on October 15, 2003 7:35:27 AM]
) because it is Israel. Games are cheaper and I don''t play much, so I bought a few games but still not all the games I have...I know the "I''m a kid, and don''t have money, so I pirate" is not a good excuse, but sorry, I have no other way to get what I need... 
) legit, with Visual c++ 6 (legit)