

Oxford:  Digital Piracy Benefits Affected Companies - earle
http://www.physorg.com/news124984600.html

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maximilian
As far as business software goes: duh! If you get young people who can't
afford your software hooked on it when they don't make any money, when they
do, they will just buy it.

Unfortunately to my dismay math software does not follow this ideal. All the
(good) math packages for students cost about $100 each. They are also pirated
at an unbelievably high rate. I finally broke down and bought mathematica and
I scavenged a copy of Matlab from a research group I worked under, but I wish
so much that they were free. If I was a professional and used their software
every day to make lots of money I wouldn't hesitate to buy their software for
plenty of cash.

A lot of students will even buy the student version of Matlab and then use the
pirated version which contains all the extra packages they need for their
homework.

Embedded compiler software is even worse. Their normal software runs in the
many thousands of dollars and their "student pricing" is sold at a heavy
discount. Unfortunately, a small percentage of a really big number is still a
big number for students. I had to get a student version of a compiler
toolchain for a project and it was like $300. Which was an order of magnitude
cheaper than the pro-edition, but $300 is a lot for a student who will just
use something else they got pirated from some other student. If they had
gotten me locked in I would probably go on in the future to use their software
and chock up that $3000 because It was what I needed.

