I pirated Turbo Pascal back in the day because I was a poor student in a Third World country and there was no way I could afford it. Ditto Turbo C.
After I started working, I had a hand in selecting Borland C++ as our in-house development platform, and we paid Borland a fortune in licensing fees. Which would have gone to Intel or another company if it were not for my, and other folks in my cohort's experience with pirated Borland products as students.
The lesson is that piracy (and to an only slightly lesser extent, free student licences) was an extremely powerful tool to keep a tool market cornered: impossible to compete on price when piracy is so ubiquitous that payment is essentially opt-in.
(I had a mouse driver disc, 5.25, that wasn't pirated, it felt like something from a parallel universe with its machine-printed label)
I really wonder when all this changed. I seem to have this idea, that I share with many others that software houses back in the day explicitly didn't care much about piracy because it got people hooked on their software and in the end enterprise would foot the bill.
I'm not sure how true this was, as I've yet to see any real official sources speaking about this myself but it seems like it was like that. But most of my thoughts about this comes from being in the piracy space back in the days so I really have no idea if this was ever a real thing or not.
A belated license to be exact :P