

Piracy is Progressive Taxation (Tim O'Reilly, 2002) - alexkay
http://openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015

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RyanMcGreal
I just recently referenced this essay in my open letter to Lily Allen:
[http://quandyfactory.com/blog/26/an_open_letter_to_lily_alle...](http://quandyfactory.com/blog/26/an_open_letter_to_lily_allen)

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clistctrl
The post is about books/music etc but i'm going to add a note about software
piracy. When I was younger of course I could not afford photoshop, nor could
my father who worked at the post office. I downloaded it, played (took me
several months) but soon I got good at it. Good enough to get a job using it,
I was also still in high school. In addition I downloaded Visual Studio 6. I
used that to learn C++ more specifically MFC. Soon I had a job programming.
Today I'm a huge Microsoft advocate, and I've urged my previous 2 employers to
purchase copies of photoshop for my desk. I'm not justifying what I did... it
is still wrong. But they gave me a valuable skill set which i'm grateful for.
While I have given them a good amount of additional business. I'll also add
that today, now that I can afford it I proudly own (and bought from legitimate
sources) most of the software I once had to download.

