You do know that you have to pay for insurance right? The total amount of monthly payments that Orange have payed probably dwarf the amount they received from the break-in.
Yeah, but it still does not outway the loss for software companies. Insurance is insurance and running a company, you would be an absolute retard if you did not have it!
And I will ask again, why do you want to hurt these companies?
I understand this is a discussion, but all I read from most people is,
1; Its alright because you are poor
2; Its alright because the companies are rich
3; Its alright because I dont own expensive gear and i am in a shitty korn cover band
4; Its alright because they dont offer stellar products or go the extra mile or have an honest price tag ( all of which are a very large grey area IMHO ).
5; Its alright because one day after you have made enough money from the product, you MAY and I repeat, MAY purchase the product.
C'MON!
Fair dinkum fellas, they are some pretty piss poor excuses!
And Gojira, if those companies were not filthy rich, then we would not possess 75% of the gear we own. They have done the research, the hard yards, put things into place to deliver us consumers a wide variety of products to choose from. ( And that takes some serious COIN! ). If you dont like what you see, dont buy it, if you do, but can not afford it, either rethink or save! These excuses above are just a lame way to condone piracy.
6; Python rules
7; Christians suck
I enjoyed reading this thread, there are some great posts in here, me? I've studied software engineering and am currently working with a VST company (I won't go link-dropping because this is my 3rd posts and I don't want to make it Spamoflauge) - the actual work that goes into developing VST suites is time-consuming and difficult, but the time it takes to create the software alone doesn't dictate the price of it, we've decided to give all our suites we were originally going to sell away for free, simply because we cannot compete with the bigger companies, they spend a LOT more on market research, testing, R&D and, as Jeff already pointed out, THOSE aspects dictate the price of a suite or plugin a LOT more than the difficulty of implementation or the time spent in development. So we were never realistically going to profit from the software, and here's why.
1. Bigger companies have huge budgets to market and research their products, they reach the professionals and convince the professionals that their product is exactly what they need, they have massive amounts to spend on improving their products from the sales their marketing generate, we can't compete with that.
2. Pirates, if they want a software, will find a way to crack and download it, this cuts down the potential market of affordable plugins, why spend $50 on a great VST if you can download an AMAZING $500 one for free? :Smug: We can't afford to implement intensive protection procedures or manufacture dongles.
We were already making freeware, with the intention to make affordable commercial products later down the line, we had the suites made and ready for sale and we figured we'd just make no money, and noone would use our shit. Do I blame piracy for that? Well, it doesn't exactly help...
Jeff, all your posts here have been very good, another point you raise I want to address is that great results can be achieved on ANY budget, people just want the big flashy applications because it's what the pros use and a lot of people will pirate these if they can't afford it, again, why spend $50 (?) on REAPER when you can download Logic or Cubase off torrents for free?
You won't get the greatest results with free and affordable software but you can damn well come close, if you want to be able to create the best quality productions then...well, it's only fair to expect to have to pay for that isn't it?