Should you pay for software that you can’t afford, but that is indispensable for your business?
(This is an edited version of an essay that I wrote for a school assignment were we had to pick a tech-related ethical dilemma and express our view.)
Software can be quite expensive. Sometimes really expensive. For example the Adobe Creative Cloud package costs about 60 euro per month. Another example is the Intellij platform from JetBreans which costs a whopping 400 euro per year.
For certain groups such as students, independent developers and small businesses, it may be tempting to pirate this software. It sounds easy, why pay hundreds of euros/dollars each year on licensing, when you can just download the software for free?
Furthermore, you can even argue that expensive license fees hurt progress and innovation. How are young developers going to accelerate their careers, if they can’t afford proper tooling? Or how can a startup launch a new product and disrupt the market, if all their funds are used for fees. Also a lot of people have the notion that big business like Microsoft or Apple don’t care about a few people stealing their products, because they receive billions of revenue yearly.
I think this is an unethical and unjust way of thinking. In this article I will try to unfold my opinion about software piracy and I hope that I can convince other people to also adhere to my viewpoint.
Argument one: it is unprofessional at its foundation
Imagine the following situation:
Peter is a chef who owns a well-known restaurant. To do his work properly, he needs expensive knifes. He goes to a shop that sells these knifes. Peter finds a knife that satisfies him. He takes the knife from the rack and puts it under his coat. He then walks out of the store like nothing happened. Later that evening he uses the knife to make delicious and expensive dishes for his customers. These stolen knifes create a lot of revenue for his business.
Normally we would be appalled if someone stole tools from a store and used these tools to create a lot of money for themselves. In this example Peter blatantly grabs expensive knifes from a store and uses these knifes to create value for himself and his customers. This may be an extreme example, but this is exactly what happens when you grab a pirated copy of your favorite IDE and use it for your business. You can create potentially a lot of value for yourself. What would be wrong with first investing a bit yourself?
I think it is fairly justified to spend a bit of money on something that you use nearly every day and (indirectly) generates a lot of cash for you. This also ties in with my second argument bellow.
Argument two: what if it was your business?
You often spend a lot of time writing you software. Countless days are wasted on coding, performance optimization, designing a killer UX experience and marketing. Naturally you would want something back for all this hard work.
How would you feel if everyone took advantage of your product and bring nothing in return? Meanwhile your cutting edge IDE or framework is used to create money for someone else. Would you be ok with that? Because if you aren’t, why are you ok with doing that to someone else? For example, one of the most used text editors, Sublime text, is developed by just one guy. I think that a lot of people reading this, use or have used Sublime Text. Don’t you agree that he deserves a reward for creating a program that you love?
Corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Adobe are nowadays industry giants, however they once started out as really small business. They grew because people bought their software. By pirating software development tools, you are denying other businesses financial growth. Would you like it if you went bankrupt or hit a financial glass ceiling, because no one want’s to legitimately buy your stuff?
Argument three: there are a lot of free alternatives
Of course it is possible that you agree with me and feel really bad about pirating your tools, but see no other alternative. I can understand this mentality. Fortunately, there are a lot of free alternatives for popular paid software. Before we look at them, I would like to clarify that I don’t want to take away revenue from developers of paid software, but want to provide free alternatives for people who can’t afford them.
First of all I mentioned the popular paid text editor Sublime Text. In my opinion the two best alternatives are Atom by GitHub and Visual Studio code by Microsoft. These two free editors are cross platform and heavily inspired by Sublime. They contain build in syntax highlighting for dozens of languages, have built in VCS integration and have thousands of plugins to enhance your workflow. They are also open source.
If you need a more full-fledged IDE, you can look at NetBeans. Even though I must admit that it can be slow sometimes, it has a lot of features that are included in products like Visual Studio and Intellij. For example, NetBeans has built in autocomplete, dependency management, code compilation and debugging.
If you aren’t a code developer, I also have some interesting tips for you. Instead of Photoshop, you can try the free open source editor Gimp. I admit it is not the most user friendly product, but it gets the job done. Another program worth looking into is Inkscape. This is the free open-source equivalent of Illustrator.
As you can see, you have a lot of options to choose from and therefore I hope that you will be less inclined to pirate software for commercial reasons.
Conclusion
I hope that after reading this article, that I have shifted your view. The most important parts that you should remember are:
- You can really hurt other small businesses
- It’s unethical/unprofessional to make money of stolen tools
- There are often a lot of open-source/free alternatives for paid software
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