[rainfreak]

<jumps eagerly onto soapbox>

I was also in development of software, both desktop/server based and web based, and can tell you that I would never want someone cracking my software. Why? Simple economics. Let's look at this realistically, shall we?

Software package development time: 100 hours
Software package sale price: $495.00
My family: wife, four kids, one dog, one ferret
My total income: Whatever I can sell of what I developed

So if you crack my software and I cannot sell as many copies of it, because someone has been kind enough to make it free, then my family suffers. And if you crack my competitor's software, I also see a loss, as some will choose a "free" version of someone else's cracked software rather than my paid version.

This growing problem in the software industry is one of the main reasons that I decided last year to sell my portion of the company (that I helped to build from ground up) to my partner and moved on to a full-time IT job. True, there were plenty of honest, moral people out there who still bought software from me and still do from my former partner and others today. But there were enough people who weren't honest and it started affecting my family's lifestyle.

I think that the real reason that people are willing to purchase software and not use cracked versions is because they see a value in what is being offered. Quality software and support. And they can know that they purchased something that helped them and helped the company/person selling it. I will admit that I do sometimes get cracked versions of software that are not available in a fully functional trial, but that is only to test it and see if it works for what I want. Once I decide that I want it, I buy it. Always.

And for me, it is because I have been on the losing side before, and would never want to make someone else suffer the way I did.

<hops off soapbox smiling>