Inducement To Piracy, Adobe Style 272
S Vulpy writes "A post at the Social Science Research Council's website talks about how piracy greases the wheels of the Adobe Creative Suite marketplace by making it easier to deal with Adobe breaking compatibility between versions. Quoting: '... such incompatibility doesn’t involve exotic functionality, just straight text layout into columns and boxes. The kind of stuff that has been core functionality of publishing software since the early 1990s. Translate this dilemma to Brazil or Russia, where incomes are a fraction that of the US and you get a very simple outcome: massive piracy of Adobe products. In fact, go through this process in the last month of a 4-year project on a deadline and one could understand becoming extremely sympathetic to such a perspective. This, as we’ve argued, is not a defect of the Adobe business model, it is the business model.'"
The psuedo-libertarian mindset. (Score:2, Interesting)
> Ah it's good to get my daily SlashKos dose, where there's always a
> featured story about how stealing is justified because of teh evil
> capitalismz0rz!!
+...versus the classic pseudo libertarian mindset.
"Tort reform for the rich. Crime and punishment for the poor."
The sad part is that the poor buy into this nonsense and happily cheer along their corporate overlords as if the last 500 years of social and political progress never happened at all.
Re:This is why I have given up on Adobe (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is HR needs you to have experience with Adobe products or your resume is thrown in the trash. Gimp who what??
I am starting a business and I hate and oppose piracy. I feel terrible and hypocritical owning a cracked version of Dreamweaver but I need experience in using it in order to not starve. I could try to use Vi and firebug only but if my business fails (90% chance it will, given statistics) then I need to have experience to fall back on. I could use paint.net and get away and *lie* about using photoshop (dishonest as well), but Illustrator is not something you can make up or do without if your future employer sits you in front of a mac with it and says do this by 12:00???
I am praying for the adoption of html 5 so we can get rid of flash. THis has hurt my ability to earn a living as a web programmer simply because all candidates pirate it and learn it that way and it is a job requirement now to have x years of experience using it for non flash sites. I believe free alternatives are the answer to piracy. Remember people pirating Oracle 12 years ago? How about today? Zelch. People use Mysql now. Also it frees us from Windows to use non propriteary alternatives. But nothing exists that is similiar to Frontpage or Dreamweaver. Gimp frankly sucks. Paint.net is promising but it shows how incompatible Mono is with .NET as it can not be ported to Linux easily.