Had a look this morning at www.adobe.com
Creative Suite 4 is now happily priced at 1,799 USD. OK it is an impressive piece of software. Upgrade from CS3 (itself a very impressive piece of software) is 599 USD.
Adobe hires designers and they need to sell many licences to pay them. True. But what if, like my clients, you get your money by fund raising, or small university grants? Well that sort of money is just not there for software. So there you go, find a torrent and hack the thing. Bad Bad Bad.
By cracking software, you are first of all doing something illegal (but for which the chance of getting caught remains small), and most importantly you are promoting the release cycles of the software industry (is CS4 not just CS3 + a few fixes + the odd feature or so?) and not promoting alternative solutions.
I run all my logo projects on Inkscape (vectorial design) because while Adobe Illustrator is the standard, Inkscape does awfully well, and for no money at all, including the fact that SVG files are an open standard.
Brochure projects are run on Scribus, which can help my clients rework them and reduces their dependancy to me. Of course Scribus is not better than InDesign. But when something is 90% another one but the price tag is 0, some wheels can start turning in your head.
In short I believe it is wrong to steal a developer's salary, but right to promote a shift in the business model that's in place.
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