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>From my experience the use of pirate software seems to fall into a few main categories (all related to cost). The main ones I've come across are:
1 Start-up - to keep initial costs down (as somebody already said); for a TWer, initial outlay can be quite prohibitive. Here the company may well progress to using legitimate copies (depends on the company).
2 Poor cousins - development tools are (usually) not too hard to get, after all, you need them to produce the product. TW, however, is still seen in many cases as not being 'as important' and any old tool that happens to be available will do.
3 'Spread'. You've got the tools you need. Somebody else in the company needs Photoshop to touch up some pictures (or whatever). You haven't time to do it so the software gets 'borrowed' for the job. For such a small one-off job it's not worth getting another license and so the software spreads.
4 The 'we buy enough of their software, this isn't really going to hurt them' syndrome.
5 It CAN be copied (basically as the recent thread on IP etc)
1 - you could argue that the software companies eventually get their money so don't really lose out but it's a bit of a tenuous argument.
2 - Show how poor the documentation is versus how good it could be (are we back to 1?)
3 - Policing needed by IT department. I've seen this range from excellent to them installing the software for you!
4/5 - we're back to ethics again, both corporate and individual.
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A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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