
I almost feel obligated to pirate Office for Mac - gliese1337
http://rys.sommefeldt.com/2012/10/01/i-almost-feel-obligated-to-pirate-office-for-mac.html
======
georgemcbay
I was fairly supportive of his thoughts until I read at the bottom that he
works for Imagination Technologies, makers of the PowerVR chipset and quite
possibly the worst company in the world when it it comes to giving any support
at all to open source drivers.

After reading that I was struck by a couple of things -- one is that it is
hard to feel bad for someone complaining about a bad actor in the software
space when they work for a bad actor in the hardware space; two is that even
if I have a bad opinion of an employer already, I still think it is bad form
to post an article like this with your employer's name linked right at the
bottom.

Even though he ultimately concludes that he won't pirate it, it is fairly easy
for bad internet "journalists" to twist what he said and involve his employer
since he names and links right to them at the bottom of his rant-post. Rant-
posts where you invoke even the idea that you may break the law are best made
on blogs that do not mention your employer.

~~~
ashcairo
Rys is cool though. He gives out of office hours support for people learning
3d graphics.

Check out his recent talk at the London Graphics Hackerspace:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWzcEKHbBv4>

~~~
bpatrianakos
That's no excuse. He may be a great guy but the OP's point stil stands. In
general we're all great people until we're not. I'm a nice guy but I've been
known to be a total asshole like anybody else. Cool guys act like dicks
sometimes and a record of being a good guy doesn't excuse one for doing
something uncool.

Bill Clinton left us with a surplus. He also cheated on his wife. Still a good
president but cheating is a dick move. See what I'm saying (please don't read
into it and focus on the wrong thing now)?

~~~
phaus
There are lots of things about Bill Clinton that I liked and just a few things
about him that I didn't, but seriously, I don't think even the most
incompetent person in the world could have left us without a surplus in the
era that the internet went mainstream.

I do agree with the point you were making.

~~~
officemonkey
The internet bubble didn't create the surplus, the "peace dividend" did. After
the former Soviet republics became our BFFs, we promptly eviscerated our Cold
War military. Combine that with some good growth in the economy (which
obviously includes the tech sector) and some welfare reform that Clinton and
Gingrich worked on together, and you got a nice surplus.

Throw in Bush-era tax cuts and two wars, and you can say bye-bye to that.

~~~
phaus
How much did our defense spending decrease? I know that we must have saved a
ton of money when Clinton cut the Army nearly in half and when we
decommissioned so many of our battleships. I've heard it said that we still
spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, but I'm not sure
what the numbers looked like before the cutbacks.

Edit: I did a little research and I was astonished to find out that welfare
programs cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually. I didn't think that
something like welfare would make up a significant percentage of the budget.
It's over 10% of the federal budget if you include all of the programs that
fall under "welfare."

Looking at the statistics, the amount of money spent on welfare didn't
significantly increase or decrease during or after Bill Clinton was in office
(until our current financial crisis.) I know that he was trying to find
smarter ways to spend the money, such as by getting people back to work with
education and employment assistance, but how could the reform have added to
the surplus if the amount of spending wasn't reduced?

After looking at this site a bit longer, it looks like every category of
spending increased each year he was in office. Even though spending increased,
there were some areas where he slowed down the rate of increase, which is
admirable. But if we increased spending in every area before, during and after
his presidency, yet we produced a surplus during his presidency, doesn't that
mean the surplus was created by the thriving economy, which was in turn
thriving because of the internet boom? I'm not asking to be argumentative, I
just don't understand how we can say that our reduced need for defense
spending combined with welfare reform caused a surplus when we didn't reduce
our spending in either category from 1993-2001.

[http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1994USbt_13bs5...](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1994USbt_13bs5n)

Edit2: Since I asked a couple of questions. Wouldn't it be more productive to
answer them instead of downvoting me? I wouldn't have asked them if I didn't
genuinely want someone to explain things to me from their perspective. Why let
someone continue to be wrong when given the opportunity to correct it?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Inflation + population growth will result in increases unless you make a
conscious decision to cut. So if you leave something alone in the budget,
you'd expect it to increase naturally over time. Even if there was no internet
boom, and the budget continued to rise, tax receipts would still go up b/c the
economy must grow to accommodate all those kids entering the workforce each
year. If you hold the line on spending increases, not eliminate the increases
but put them below the rate of growth, you'll have a surplus.

------
Osmium
I just wanted to give a counter-point here, to show they're not all bad.
Microsoft saved me recently, when (due to my own stupidity) I was in a foreign
country without my main computer and I'd forgotten to install Office for Mac,
which I needed urgently to finish a presentation. Luckily, I had my license
key so I entered it in on their website, and they gave me a link to download
the full version of Office. No questions asked. I hadn't even bought it off
Microsoft directly in the first place; I'd bought a student version off a
third party.

This might seem like a no-brainer feature, but when I've bought software
online in the past it's often come with a 30-day download link, and when that
link expires you're out of luck. You have to have the forethought to retain
the install image to be able to install it in future. So I was actually
impressed and grateful to Microsoft for that.

------
nobodyshere
I currently live in Belarus and dealt with the same crap a few days ago. Win 8
pro upgrade offer? Sure, but not for you, pal. Try looking for it at local
resellers... Same situation is here with paypal, which makes us register it
for different countries. So there I was, buying a VPN to buy Windows. How
stupid is that? I've always been confident that internet is one single area.
It can not be separated by countries. It is one network with no geography, no
boundaries. Itunes music purchase? Yeah, very funny. Google Play books or
movies or music? Amazon mp3 store? Nope and nope on every point. So nope, I'll
not give them a single cent until the day they fix their behaviour. And yes,
I'll pirate as much as I can, even being a software developer myself, knowing
all the efforts it takes.

------
neverm0re
Is Office even necessary anymore? Where I work, most people are using
LibreOffice or Google Docs and not a single complaint about document exchange
or document formats. There's a few Office holdouts, but even they haven't had
an issue exchanging documents with the rest of us. Even I behave like a normal
human being and use LibreOffice instead of Emacs when I wanna play nice at
work.

What exactly is the killer feature of Office to people not obsessed with
Outlook? Mac doesn't even have that, having to settle for EntouRAGE. (EDIT: My
mistake, not used Mac Office in a long while -- Outlook now exists!)

~~~
potatolicious
Outlook on Mac certainly exists - and is much, much better than the thoroughly
aneurysm-inducing Entourage.

But yeah, at my last two jobs we've exclusively used Google Docs, and it's
been a dream. No more hunting your inbox for a (probably outdated) copy of the
Office doc. Sharing is a dream.

It's not quite as usable as a native app. I would be rather happy if there
were a native client to GDocs, but as it stands, the ability to collaborate,
share, and disseminate far, far trumps whatever usability gaps between it and
Office.

~~~
Osmium
Yep, Outlook (Office 2011) replaced Entourage (Office 2008) on Mac.

------
gmac
At least they only _made a bad job_ of trying to take his money. Commonly when
I want to stream a movie rental, the studios have seen to it that there is
absolutely no way I can legitimately pay for that service.

------
bpatrianakos
I am annoyed and frustrated by so,e software therefor it's okay for me to not
pay for it? Give me a break. This is such a lame justification for piracy. If
the author truly _wants_ to pay for it then he will. Saying you want to pay
for it in an attempt to seem on the up and up and really _wanting_ to pay for
something are different. I can understand the frustration and I can empathize
and I can get on board with the idea that the process they put you through to
buy Office is ridiculous but I can't buy the justification for piracy. Just
because you sell software yourself for a living doesmt put you in a position
to decide when it's okay to pirate software. The author may consider the way
in which he sells his software to be superior and therefore it's not okay to
pirate what he sells but when it comes to someone else's well that's a
different story. But its a slippery slope. Microsoft's process certainly is
ludicrous but it's not long before people start saying "you want me to enter
an email address to buy software? Oh, that's too much, I think I'll just
pirate it, thanks".

Calling it one's and zeros doesn't justify it either. I hate the ones and
zeros argument. You're not paying for one's and zeros. You're paying for the
value the software creates for you. It may only need to be coded and compiled
once but does that mean that after the first person gets value from it that
the software has been paid for? Of course not.

If someone creates software and you value what it can do then you are
obligated to pay for it if that's what the creator asks. Argue about the
definition of stealing till your blue in the face but it doesn't change the
fact that you are depriving the author of revenue they would otherwise have
gotten. It is stealing and to say otherwise is to do some impressive mental
gymnastics.

The system may suck but piracy isn't going to solve the problem. It's just
going to create more problems. Using Office without a license doesn't hurt
Microsoft. What hurts them is a more popular alternative. The only thing that
will change what the author complains about is someone else creating some half
decent office replacement in a way that shows Microsoft how to do it right. If
such a program existed and were widely adopted you'd better believe they'd
take notice and shape up. Piracy hurts people. It doesn't hurt the big guys
though and we know it so we all tend to justify it. But that same attitude
that gets people thinking its okay to pirate Office allows people to justify
pirating software from smaller companies and that's who it hurts.

I see no justification for piracy.

~~~
neverm0re
How about when you pay USD$10,000 for a niche software package with a crappy
USB hardware dongle with drivers that only work on Windows XP, despite the
application itself working just fine under Windows 7 64-bit?

When I asked the vendor, I was told I could pay another $10,000 so I could buy
a new version of the software that just so happened to have a newer DRM
dongle.

At that point you really have four options:

1.) Hope someone else pirated it. 2.) Kill a few evenings cracking the
application with IDA Pro. 3.) Forever remain on Windows XP on a graphics
workstation, unable to use the entirety of RAM installed, or some horrible
dual-boot situation isolating you from the rest of your tools. 4.) Pay ANOTHER
$10,000.

Seriously, you have no position to tell anyone that there's 'no
justification'. It's obvious you're missing real world experience here. I
picked #2, myself, but I'd have rather saved time and picked #1 if it had
already been done.

~~~
bpatrianakos
I have the real world experience and I stand by my position. It does suck and
I can empathize and of course I can understand why you'd pirate the software
but are you really going to try to tell me that it's not wrong? Can you
honestly say that not paying is okay because the price is too high and you
don't agree with the reasons why you can't run your dongle on a new OS? That's
what it comes down to in the end. It's about not wanting to pay and
disagreeing with the price. The fact that you know the dongle should work on
your machine doesn't put you in a position to _know_ why they want you to
upgrade. Anyone in that situation would have a knee-jerk reaction and jump to
thinking its a corporate conspiracy and they're just gouging people. That's
plausible. Or maybe there's a legit reason that you don't know. But in either
case, no matter how ridiculous the experience is (and I grant you that the
example you provide is very unreasonable) it still doesn't change the fact
that someone created something of value to you, you want to use it above all
alternatives, and you choose to pirate it which is wrong.

Suppose I go to the Apple store and I want a new MacBook Air. I have to wait
in line for an hour. Then when I get into the store they've upped the price by
$10k. Then, even after swallowing my frustration, I look to pay but all the
checkout guys are busy. So I decide this is fucked up and just walk out with
it. You'd agree that was a messed up situation but it's not okay for me to
walk out of a store without paying.

The point is something I can't fathom anyone disagreeing with. There's a
product. It has a price. If you want it you have to buy it. If you take it
without paying _that is wrong_. How can you disagree with that?

~~~
neverm0re
Yes, I can clearly and with good conscious say that it is 100% a-ok to break
the lock or take a cracked copy of software you already paid $10,000 for to
operate with a $180,000 system if the vendor is going to gouge you over a
trivial issue.

I'm really sorry that you live in a fantasy world sponsored by the MPAA and
RIAA. I've already paid my pound of flesh to get my work done, intentionally
not backporting a dongle driver to force upgrades at $10k a whack is the stuff
slime is made of. They do this because they know very well there are not
many/any alternative vendors for this equipment, which happens to be an exotic
motion capture rig absolutely critical to my work. Fuck that and fuck anyone
who tells me I have to grin and bear it or otherwise just wave my hands and go
without all because otherwise I might offend their sensibilities over how I
might see _their_ software. Personally, I don't care about your software. It
hasn't done anything slimy to me yet. You're safe.

~~~
bpatrianakos
I'm sorry, I misunderstood part of what you said. I'm actually cool with
people cracking software they've already paid for. That's fine. To me that's
like modifying your car in ways that stop it from being street legal. You
should be free to do so but at the same time I won't feel bad for you if you
were ever stopped for speeding. Now that I understand your example better I
don't think you're comparing equivalent things. It's one thing to just take
something because you don't like the price and it's another thing to break
contract and modify something you've already paid for. Both are still wrong
but I can see the justification for the latter.

------
keithpeter
The original author uses Office on Windows at work. My employer has a
licensing scheme that means purchasing a licence for my own use at home is
very cheap (something like £10 for Office 2010).

I'm thinking could the oa use something like crossover office

[http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name?app_id=...](http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name?app_id=6132)

or could they use a Windows 7 VM? Better than pirating in my personal world.

~~~
rys
I'll ask and see if we have a scheme like that at work. I don't own a license
of Office for Windows that I can use in a VM or with Crossover, but I'd be
willing to entertain that if the price was right.

------
victorbstan
I can completely sympathise with your experience! I tried buying window 7 a
while ago, as a digital download, from Canada. Guess what? The on-line store
wouldn't sell to Canadians? We're on the same frigging continent, it's the
internet! WTF?! Frankly I don't even know why they are still in business. The
whole thing is run by monkeys. I ended up purchasing a licence, and then
pirating the actual software, thus I can say that I paid for it, and frankly
pirating MS software is SUPERIOR EXPERIENCE compares to purchasing it.
Monkeys.

------
rythie
In the grand scheme of things, it's better for Microsoft that you pirate
Office than use something else - so really you are not punishing them for
their mistake by doing that.

Your continued use of Office, will mean people can continue sending Office
documents and you can send them too, if you used something else that whole
system gets disrupted and people you work with consider new tools too. If you
share your doc with Google docs for example, their copy of Office for that
task is useless and after a while everyone might be using it, in my view it's
a much better workflow than email documents around.

Just my 2 cents [I don't think anyone should pirate software by the way].

------
jordanthoms
Why do these companies think it's a good idea to refuse to sell to a customer
depending on where they live?

I can understand in the case of Netflix etc where they legally cannot provide
access outside of the areas where they have the licences, but there is no such
issue here - Microsoft is fully able to distribute their own product, and
there isn't even a shipping issue since it's just online.

Even Google has this problem, where they won't ship their devices from the
play store to anywhere outside of a few countries, even though they would be
fully able to.

~~~
reeses
A) People in different regions will pay different amounts of money. By
restricting regions in which a person can use a thing (such as DVDs) they can
sell at the price each market will bear. B) Sometimes, the separate regions
are managed by separate corporations (wholly owned by the parent) which have
their own pricing policy. C) Often there are local laws or agreements
dictating that the corporation not undercut local distributors.

------
geuis
I have a saying I like to think I coined, "Don't make it hard for your
customers to give you money". I think that applies here.

When you are working to optimize your business, take a step back. If you're
focused on adding new features or exploring some marketing campaign, consider
how you can optimize the most important part instead: getting paid.

There have been more times than I can remember where I would have bought or
paid for something if only the retailer hadn't made it so difficult.

------
SeoxyS
If your experience with Office sucks, just don't buy it. There is not
justification for pirating. It's a free market, and Microsoft's monopoly is
long gone.

I haven't used Office in years and I've done just fine. The few time people
send me `docx` documents, I can either open them up with Preview, Pages, or
simply not open it. Most of the time, I don't care enough about the contents.
When it's a resumé, sending anything other than a PDF or a website is an
instant fail.

~~~
rm999
>When it's a resumé, sending anything other than a PDF or a website is an
instant fail.

What sucks is when you make your resume in latex and you apply to a company
that only takes word or raw text files. I've actually skipped out on companies
because of this.

------
tankbot
So? Set up with a VPN that has stateside IPs, or build your own on AWS.

Whether you pirate Mac Office or not though: I've been using it for awhile now
and it's pretty lackluster. Most of the programs are stripped down versions.
It usually gets the job done, but you'll probably run into a situation at some
point where you want to do something that isn't included with Mac Office 2011.

~~~
JackWebbHeller
>> So? Set up with a VPN that has stateside IPs, or build your own on AWS.

Is that a serious suggestion...?!

~~~
tankbot
Well it's sort of a half-assed suggestion since I don't like the program. But
there are many free VPNs that could solve this problem easily and rolling your
own is fun and informative.

Pretty weak blog piece to be honest. Proclaiming that it's somehow a moral
duty to steal something is trumped up nihilism at best.

------
countessa
While I appreciate the frustration (and lord knows Microsoft have frustrated
me plenty given I spend half my time developing for their platform), no matter
how difficult they make it for you to buy, it's never an excuse not to.

------
Karunamon
In my arrogant opinion, if a company _will literally not allow you to give
them your money_ , they shouldn't whine later about how piracy is killing
their sales, making angels and puppies cry, etc.

------
rhplus
It sounds like the problem is that a sales & marketing email took him to the
wrong site.

To pirate the software he'd at the very least need to do a search on Google to
find out how. A simple search[1] shows how easy it is. The first result is a
warez site called "Official Apple Store - UK" where he can download it
immediately with very little effort.

[1] <http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=office+mac+uk>

------
michaelpinto
The best way to run MS Office on a Mac? I use VMware and just run Office
within Windows. What's funny is that this is actually faster than launching
Office for the Mac while showing me what a Windows user is seeing. By the way
I'm doing this on an iMac so I'm not using anything too exotic in terms of
hardware.

------
Zaheer
If you have Office at work you may be elegible to get office for just $10.

[http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/otherproducts.aspx?culture...](http://www.microsofthup.com/hupus/otherproducts.aspx?culture=en-
US)

I got it through my University for just $10.

------
bborud
If you use Microsoft Office you are part of the problem.

Please don't be part of the problem.

------
trotsky
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3D...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mac+office)

I'm pretty sure it was a lot easier for me to come up with that link than for
him to write that narcissistic blog entry.

------
niggler
BizSpark.

------
zio99
rys, what are using for your blog's backend? octopress? jekyll?

------
yakshay
I'm not sure why Microsoft doesn't put it up on the App Store. They will
probably get a lot less customer information, but things would be so
convenient. Apple will stand to make a cut, but then there are several
companies which sell both on the web as well as the App Store - why not do
that.

Adobe was hesitant at first too. They brought several smaller apps to the App
Store at first, then followed by some big ones.

~~~
AmVess
Apple getting a cut is the reason why MS doesn't put it on that service.
There's no point in paying 30% if you don't have to, and MS doesn't have to.

------
pootch
You could just go to an apple store and buy it. Pretty lazy to pirate
something thats pretty cheap to start with. If you dont have 149 bucks, maybe
you have bigger problems than word processing?

------
w1ntermute
Microsoft.Office.2011.With.SP1.MAC.OSX-CRBS is what you're looking for.

Also, guide from torrent comments (don't personally know if they work, but
many people reported that they did):

\- unrar the download and install the .dmg

\- download the crack from [Edit: Google "2011fixTL.rar" to find a link to a
"www-mediafire.com" site, around the 6th result. Change the "www-" in the URL
to "www." to get the MediaFire download link] (this one still worked for me)
and unrar it

\- now open spotlight and type terminal

\- click Terminal to run it

\- type "cd /" and hit enter

\- type "open /Library/Preferences" and it will open up the correct folder

\- drag the files from the crack folder in to this preferences map

\- now try open Word and it should ask you for your name, this means the hack
worked. If it ask to validate your licence-key it failed.

\- click no on all the support questions and keep continueing

\- word should now open, same for the other office programs

~~~
hack_edu
I suggest removing the direct link to the crack if you want to avoid being
flagged for deletion.

