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> the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary

In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows and Office.

> removing the tools that help them to compete

You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux and turns these people into second-class citizens.



many software companies choose to upload "cracked" versions of their own software ...




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