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In a tailspin side conversation based on the legality of downloading music, someone made the comment that when you are poor, it’s ok to steal software, music and movies because the companies that generate them aren’t technically losing any revenue.

The full comment was so ridiculous I won’t even repeat it here, but the comments on that have started another interesting topic. I say interesting, when in reality I mean dumb. The idea is that you can justify taking something that you didn’t pay for as long as a) you couldn’t afford to pay for it and b) the company isn’t losing money by you doing so.

Perhaps I am hyper-sensitive to it because I work for a company that pays me based on the money they make selling software. Perhaps I am annoyed by it because I pay for software and music and it bugs me that prices I pay are inflated to pay for all the jerks that steal it.

To that end, the comment thread is as follows:

Look, when you’re poor like me, you’re not going to buy those products anyway, so they are not losing any revenue. I do make a practice of financially supporting things I like when I *can*, but the reality is that most of us simply can’t. And when it comes to things that are simply essential for getting by in modern society, like PHOTOSHOP, which is a 600 dollar program… well, it’s almost criminal to deny the poor access to it.

I was amused by the contention that Adobe was criminal in denying poor citizens basic essentials like food, water, the right to free speech and the right to edit their Facebook photos to make them look less fat.

But the supporting comments, while admitting the criminal part was silly, agreed that the logic was sound. The logic is sound? Stealing is ok, sometimes?

To that end, I felt my comment response deserved it’s own post.

That’s just trying to justify stealing… if that were the case then it would be “ok” to sneak into a movie or concert you couldn’t afford to pay for or sit in college classes you weren’t enrolled for. When did our society lose our moral compass so bad that it’s a “logical” argument that it’s OK to steal as long as it doesn’t appear as the company is being economically hurt by doing so. I am pretty sure stealing is stealing regardless of the financial impact it causes. If someone gives you something for free, is it OK for me to take it since it doesn’t hurt you economically?

The reality is that the company IS being economically hurt by this kind of theft. In the case of Adobe, they put out quite functional lower end products that are priced for the consumer who can’t (and shouldn’t) be paying for their flagship product. I think you could make a solid argument that many people are stealing Adobe Photoshop CS5 and that is causing a loss to Adobe for sales of Photoshop Elements.

The other problem is this “because I can’t pay for it” is bullshit. It’s because you don’t want to. You bought the computer, you bought the digital camera…because you HAD to, you couldn’t steal those. Now you are claiming that you are too poor to buy the software that you want to use to get the most out of them. Cry me a river.

If you wanted a photo editing system, you should have scaled back your camera and computer if $80 for Photoshop Elements was out of your budget. I have a fully licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Mac and on my PC I use Photoshop Elements. I can’t imagine any normal consumer who wouldn’t be fully served by the latter, it does 90% of what Photoshop CS5 does.

Stealing is stealing…

That’s right, stealing IS stealing. If you are doing something that requires Adobe’s $2,600 flagship product suite, I would HOPE that you are getting paid to do it. If not, I would *hope* that you bought it for WAY less because you are going to school to LEARN to do it. If not, I would hope that you, like me, took advantage of Adobe’s educational discount program and got it at a reasonable price ($350 for the Design Standard Suite).

If you aren’t in those buckets, look into a cheaper or free alternative. There are appropriate options for all situations and none of them justify stealing it.

There has been a flurry of posts going around Twitter today about an Adobe Engineering asking Linux users to place requests for Creative Suite apps for Linux. While the geek in me thinks “Cool, they totally should!” The businessman in me says that this has no chance of ever getting of the ground.

Of course this sentiment is well challenged, but I just don’t believe that the Linux desktop community at large is willing to pay for software, especially software that costs between $1,300 and $2,600. Of course this is speaking from a sweeping generalization of Linux users, a broad stereotype, but one I think is well deserved and relatively accurate. Of course it’s not without exception, but come on…

Quick, hurry, name a company that has made big money selling desktop applications for Linux! What? You can’t think of one? Me either.

There is a reason for that, the market is as big as the audience is willing to spend and outside of big ticket apps like Massive or Maya (that benefit from big ass clusters that are just cost prohibitive to do with Windows or OS X), creative types live in paid OSes.

There are of course many many reasons:

• Adobe apps aren’t the only apps they need
• Support is important
• You use what the people you work with/for use
• The general population just doesn’t trust or “get” Linux.

I could rattle reasons off all day. The reality is that Linux as a desktop operating system is just not taken seriously. Sure if you rattle the cages of the most vocal 2% of the web you will get thousands of thousands of responses, but that doesn’t make any sort of statistically significant sample of the users that are willing to plunk down their plastic and pay $2,600 for an application.

That’s the thing with a lot of these guys, if you ask a loaded question like “Should Adobe release the Creative Suite for Linux?” you are going to get every Linux gearhead on the planet saying “Hell yea!” But if you were to ask for pre-orders, you’d probably get 100 if that.

I work for a big software company and the hard reality is that developing software is incredibly expensive. Adobe is not going to even consider something like this until there is a proven market for it.

You can talk all you want about being a leader or pioneer, but nobody wants to lead their company into the red.

I have current paid license for Adobe’s Creative Suite, Lightroom, ProTools, Logic Studio, Final Cut, Office, Windows, OS X, iWork… I pay for software. The honest to God truth is that if I could get ALL of that software at half price on Linux, I still wouldn’t do it. I regularly use Fedora, I have used Ubuntu, Debian and a dozen other Linux OSes over the years and they just don’t “feel” right.

I am a firm believer in “you get what you pay for.” As much as I love to play with Linux, and wouldn’t look anywhere outside of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for my Web Development projects, I wouldn’t even consider it on any of my machines as a desktop OS. I keep the latest flavors of Fedora and Ubuntu on a VM so I can see what they are up to and what’s new, but I’d never use it for real work.

Editor’s Note: As much as this probably seems like flame bait, I want Linux to improve and compete, and I think in time it can. The problem that it faces (and one that Ubuntu is uniquely positioned to solve) is that group development can only take you so far. You need a leader, you need to make changes that are for the good of the user, and you need to test against people who aren’t hardcore Linux users to see if you are succeeding or not. They are taking a great step in dumping Gnome. I would start to look even harder at taking out some of the cheesy apps that come bundled, and spend a whole release on polish. The core is there, it just doesn’t feel right.

Dawngrrl was pointing out to me that my blog has been quite stagnant of late. I will toss in one excuse, which I have been doing some maintenance to the site, and that is complete, but honestly with the holidays, snow doldrums and a series of way to intense hobbies lately, I have just been a slacker. Enough of that, to the point.

This post is really a conversation about software anti-piracy schemes that is based on some research and thoughts on the activation process that comes with Adobe’s CS4 (and earlier) software line.

The Problem
I purchased a legal and legitimate copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended. I installed it on my Mac Pro and my Macbook Pro promptly and began the Lynda.com training to learn all the new features and goodies in the new version. My Mac Pro shares space with my audio gear making it not the most comfortable place to do real graphics work (something I am working to remedy as we speak) so I decided to go through the tutorials on my iMac. I got started and then wanted to check out some of the features for myself, but I don’t have Photoshop installed on the iMac. My quick remedy was to just open the Macbook Pro nearby so I can check stuff out, but tonight as I watch my beloved Cleveland Cavaliers, I decided to do a little reading about Adobe’s license strategy. I quickly learned that I am not able to have it “activated” on more than two machines and although I can install it on all three and activate and un-activate the software, after 20 or so activations, I would be locked out and have to call Adobe and beg to be able to use my software again, not an option.

The Myth
So after doing quite a bit of reading I found a lot of anti-Adobe sentiment by not so scrupulous users who openly admit, on Adobe’s forums no less, to using cracked versions of their software.Quickly you see the overwhelming majority believe that the Adobe authorization scheme is useless and does not stop piracy whatsoever.

“When CS4 is released the activation or whatever methods they employ will be cracked within days of the release. That is FACT.
I ask… How can Adobe think this is a good business decision? It’s like a slap in the face to the honest people who try to give Adobe our money and do the right thing. Maybe they are trying to push us to the point that we steal the software instead. Sure seems like it.”

This quote from one of the members of the forums clearly illustrates the myth and I think it’s time we set the record straight. I will say it as clear as possible. Activation methods are meant to stop software Piracy, but not the type of piracy you might be thinking of.

I think you will find that Adobe, Microsoft and other large software vendors accept a certain amount of illegal piracy just like Wal-Mart builds in theft into their sales projections. It’s a fact of life in the software industry. Of course they will do everything they can to stop it, but that’s not the only kind of piracy, and honestly it’s not the worst kind. I would say with confidence that the guys that download activation cracks and search websites for stolen keys never intended to pay for the software anyway. In this case it’s not really a lost sale as much as pure theft.

But there is piracy that IS lost sales. Three types that I can think of are the “casual” pirate and the “soho” pirate and the “accidental” pirate.
The casual pirate is the guy who will install any software that his buddy gives him to install. He won’t really go out of his way to figure out ways to steal it, and he can afford it, but without any real consequence, he’ll install it and not think twice. The reality is that if you make it difficult for this person to pirate it, or discourage his friend from passing it along, he’ll buy it and Adobe keeps the sale. Activation schemes accomplish this. By making me reluctant to give you my key, Adobe forces this casual user to buck up and pay for it.

The soho pirate is usually the small business that has a small design shop or web design firm. Back in the old days these were big problems because computers weren’t networked often and the user would buy one copy of Photoshop and install it on every computer in the building, no harm no foul, no consequence. Now that computers are almost always networked and usually also on the internet, activation schemes takes away this convenient license abuse and “encourages” the owner to buy the correct number of licenses.

The last category, the accidental pirate is usually not using the software at all. He is the IT guy at a huge company, and his job is just to install the software he is told to install. Without the management software and activation, there is really no way to know if they are still in the valid license zone. These strategies keep the companies “honest” by making sure they don’t over extend their licenses.

In Conclusion
I will admit to being slightly annoyed that I can’t install CS4 on all three of my Macs. I wish I could, but as someone who works for a major software company, I completely understand the logic. Adobe isn’t “going after” the customer; they are just protecting their intellectual property by making sure the licenses are followed.

Microsoft announced Windows 7 and are apparently giving up on Windows Vista, the failure…right?

Well, if you pay attention to dates, and I do, then it looks like we have a huge list of failures on our hands, let’s take a look at a few of such familiar utter software failures, shall we?

Here we go, in no particular order:

Apple OS X v10.5 Leopard

Yea, you know I would go there, so let’s just get it out of the way shall we? OS X 10.4 “Tiger” was released on April 29th, 2005. Due to obvious market failure and un-acceptance (note the sarcasm) Apple was forced to release OS X 10.5 “Leopard” just a mere 2 1/2 years after the release of Tiger. The shame! Oh, and in case you aren’t getting my cynicism just yet, “Isn’t Leopard just an updated version of Tiger?”

Adobe Creative Suite CS3

That’s right folks, apparently everyone hated all of the CS3 applications. Released in March of 2007, Adobe was forced to release CS4 in less than two years from the launch of CS3. It offers modest updates to CS3 in many categories and is apparently one big bug fix, why else release it so quickly.

Microsoft Windows 95

Credited for much of the internet boom, as well as being one of the most prolific operating systems ever, Windows 95 was released on August 24th 1995. Around 2 1/2 years later, Microsoft released Windows 98. Realistically it was much like Windows 95, the User Interface was nearly identical. Drivers were compatible and almost all software claimed it was Windows 95/98 compatible. I am sure this should sound familiar.

Apple iPhone 3G

Ok, fine, I am picking on them, but seriously. The new iPhone came out so fast people were flat out pissed that they bought the first one. The original iPhone shipped in June of 2007 and the 3G version (which everyone really wanted) shipped in July of 2008 with zero incentive program to help early adopters upgrade. Ouch!

The Truth About Software

I am going to let you in on a little secret. Software companies are, wait for it… trying to make money. I can tell you from someone who lives inside the Microsoft machine, that when a version of software is shipped, the next version is already in development and the version after that is being planned. I am not exaggerating, that’s how it works. For people to be surprised that Windows 7 is being talked about is pretty funny to be honest. Microsoft has admitted that Windows Vista went through some growing pains and shipped late. All that means is the Windows 7 team had plenty of time to work on their code.

I don’t consider Windows Vista a failure, and I would bet the sales figures don’t tell that story either. I understand the mountain of bad press Vista has received and some of it is warranted. But when the bandwagon got rolling, boy did it start spitting out negativity from tons of people who had never even seen Vista, much less used it. We can thank Apple’s ads that are, to be nice, less than truthful in their depiction of Windows Vista.

The legacy has some really good points outside of that. I am betting it will be Windows Vista that goes down in history as the operating system that brought true 64-bit operating systems to the masses. Go to Best Buy and see how many new PCs are running Vista 64-bit edition.

Windows Vista will also be the operating system that made Windows Media center move from a boutique version of Windows to giving users true, seamless and fantastic media capabilities on their computer, features that you still won’t find anywhere near the Apple OS X/Front Row/Apple TV ecosystem.

Sure there are many other new features in Vista, and all new OS versions have tons of new features, but these two are huge, just you watch.

I am pretty sure we have all complained about Adobe’s prices for software. They are pretty expensive. What you probably don’t know is that their educational discount policies are a little bit more flexible than you might have thought.

I always thought you had to be a current student at the college level to purchase at the 40-60% discounts that websites like Academic Superstore offer. A little investigation revealed that those prices are also extended to K-12 students and better yet, parents of K-12 students.

That means that since I am the proud parent of a 6th grader, I was able to order a brand spankin new copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended for $297. What’s the retail on that bad boy? $999 US. that’s a savings of over $700.

Of course that’s only valid for non-business use, but as my photography is purely a hobby, there are no sticky license issues and I have a completely legal and full copy of Adobe Photoshop Extended for Mac at significant savings.

If you are in the market and have a child at home, don’t miss this opportunity.