>When we look at foreign countries where the licensie violation or piracy is most accepted, you'll often find that these countries have a very bad economical situation. Making use of illegal software isn't a matter of greed or dishonesty but pure survival. If you make a (small) living out of developing programs and one license costs about $ 100,000 and every rival is using this software illegally you've two choices:
> - Stay with your principle and starve to death
> - make an illegal copy of the software
>Who are we to convict this kind of piracy ??? I personally find it very hard to disagree with this kind of violation.

This is why I find it hard to condemn people. If I haven't walked in their shoes, I can't have the whole picture. Some things are black and white; this isn't one of them.

>Another argument might be that a local law could say (like in holland) you could return a product if it does not do what you expected it should do. Though this rule is a bit vague, I think it could be applied to software as well.

The only problem with this is all the CDR and CDRW drives out there...

>In these many messages I did note the remark that "trust, integrity and honesty is very important in our business". By my own ethics I totally agree. But if look at the real world we 'll certainly see that especially those unwritten rules are most violated by all (or at least a few) big software vendors which in their turn do expect we live to their rules. That's what I call hypocritism, but let me say this clear, this is not an argument to violate the licences.

Right. Just because someone or something does something wrong, doesn't give you the right to do something wrong to them.

>What I find interesting, is that nobody did react on the statement that piracy has played and will be playing an active positive role in the use of computers and software development. It's funny we reject piracy but on the other hand we all have taken advantage of the fact that it does exist.

It definitely has helped hardware sales and therefore R&D and evolution. Piracy frees money that can be spent on hardware. I am not clear on how it has helped software development.

>One last call to Ed Rauh:
>By just ignoring me here on the UT is not buying any sympathy and (by my own ethics:) does not prove of any professional behaviour. I strongly suggest to at least answer my last message to you and talk this out.

Walter, it is unfortunate, but some people take it personally when someone disagrees with them. Ed appears to be one of those people. I don't have anything against him, but I thought I should voice my objection of one of his statements. Now, because of this and the resulting argument, he seems to have something against me personally.

Hopefully you guys can be friendly.

Take it easy,
Joe