<story><title>Editorial: &quot;How piracy changed my life&quot;</title><url>http://www.neowin.net/news/editorial-how-piracy-changed-my-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lumberjack</author><text>Same with Windows and Office. It&apos;s better to have them pirate your program than run somebody&apos;s else.</text></item><item><author>meritt</author><text>It&apos;s always been rumored that Adobe software, especially Photoshop, has been easy to pirate to encourage adoption with a user base that might otherwise seek alternatives. As those people hone their skills and eventually find jobs, Photoshop is the norm and what their employers purchase licensing for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wting</author><text>&quot;Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don&apos;t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they&apos;re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They&apos;ll get sort of addicted, and then we&apos;ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.&quot;&lt;p&gt;-- Bill Gates during speech at University of Washington&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropir...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Editorial: &quot;How piracy changed my life&quot;</title><url>http://www.neowin.net/news/editorial-how-piracy-changed-my-life</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lumberjack</author><text>Same with Windows and Office. It&apos;s better to have them pirate your program than run somebody&apos;s else.</text></item><item><author>meritt</author><text>It&apos;s always been rumored that Adobe software, especially Photoshop, has been easy to pirate to encourage adoption with a user base that might otherwise seek alternatives. As those people hone their skills and eventually find jobs, Photoshop is the norm and what their employers purchase licensing for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reidrac</author><text>Definitely, but I think is just Microsoft investing in their ecosystem.&lt;p&gt;In schools students learn &quot;Word&quot; and not &quot;a word processor&quot;. I&apos;ve seen high schools getting software licences with special deals (way cheaper), and thanks to that other solutions are discouraged (ie. &quot;Word&quot; is the standard and it will be required by any future job offer)&lt;p&gt;Can all students afford a Word licence? (ie. practice at home) It really doesn&apos;t matter, piracy it&apos;s OK because it is an investment. Companies are the final target (won&apos;t run pirated software and all candidates are trained to use that software).&lt;p&gt;You can find that kind of strategy also in open source (ie. Red Hat benefits from CentOS).</text></comment>