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Last edited: Aug 27, 2015

Here is all your answers

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Just like in real life... if You cant afford somethin' and you're not good at stealing well, just leave the product on the shelf.

We are talkin' about software, music software in this specific case, if you dont make enough money from your work/passion leave the big toys to the big studios. There are plenty of freeware alternatives too...

 

If my gain is more than 1000 bucks/year il go to buy stuff. If not, i never pay on software expensive 3 or more times than my shity PC. And i tell you, till now never happened.

 

I don't think software is in any danger (apple and their continuing expansion of logic/mainstage into a full studio and stage tool as an example. Meanwhile protools continues to become more and more irrelevant as a platform and steinberg continues to march it's way to obscurity. At the end, I think cakewalk and apple and the open source projects will become the de facto platforms and that can't be anything but a good thing considering they are both geared to being creative tools.The server side notion will never hold up until at least 1GB becomes the internet standard..and that is a long lounge way out (30 years to reach 10mbit - you do the math)

what I think might be a problem is the creativity itself. I've heard very (very little) in the last few years that encourages me that there is much of that going on and I blame the preset/emulation plugins and loops market for that.
But that said, I think the upside is that it's just about hit it's saturation point and the novelty is wearing thin. A lot of those novelties will shake off and most of that will disappear (I hope) and the next generation of tools will be creatively geared, not emulations of things none can remember or really understand why they were replaced with better technology.

 

Right here is the reason that people think they should get software for free and developers who want to get paid for their product are copyright nazis.

As an ex software developer i can assure you that the developement of decent software is not cost free. Who the fuck do you think pays peoples wages while the software is being developed, people have to eat, bills have to be paid, it costs to have a website hosted, you have to pay for bandwith, etc etc. If you are a company, you have to pay office costs, wages, etc, etc.

Then when the software is ready for sale, you have to sell enough product to recover your developement costs before you even start to make any profit.
Assuming that there are enough honest people left in the world who are willing to pay for your product even after its been cracked.

I can tell you why i gave up writing software for sale, it happened a long time ago but i guess its still relevent today.
Way back in the past, when usenet, fidonet and bulliten boards were where it all happened I bought myself an amiga 500 to play games on. On the front cover of an amiga magazine one month was a free copy of some programming software. Using this i got into assembly language programming and then went to college to do a software engineering course so i could learn to program better. I spent 2 years doing this, then got registered as a commodre amiga developer and spent nearly £3000 on a dev kit from commodore.
So at this time, i've spent £3000 on hardware, at college for 2 years, with no income so an actual lose of many thousands of pounds and i had just started to write some software to sell. So not much "pure profit" so far.

Fast forward a few months and i have my product finished and ready to sell, actually got it favourably reviewed in an amiga mag and waited for the cash to start rolling in. And kept waiting.
The software was being downloaded a lot and i was getting lots of support questions asked, most of them from people who said they loved the program and used it a lot. However, the amount sold was nowhere near the amount that seemed to be in use.

The final straw was when i went to a big computer show , in earls court i think, and there i found 3 large companies who also did amiga software all using cracked copies of my software on the machines that they were using to sell their own software. I even spoke to a developer from one of these companies and i asked him about piracy and he was complaining that it was really bad and cost them a lot of income.

Thats when i gave up being an independent developer, if your own kind will decide to use someone else's product without paying for it and then moan about piracy then i figured there was no hope of me making any income out of software developement. My software was put out as shareware, an oldstyle way of selling software that relied on people being honest, seemed like a good idea to me. What can i say, i am a child of the 60's, i was a bit of a hippie and love would overcome everything I wasn't really angry at the group that put out a crack so that people could register it in their name but i was bloody annoyed at the developer twats who used a crack.

This was 20 years ago and its got a lot worse since then, we have a generation that has grown up with napster, pirate bay etc. They seem to believe as the op does, that software is essentially cost free to make, so why should they pay for it.

So, i can almost hear you thinking, wtf am i doing here
Well after moving to pc's when i started working with a friend doing cad work, we got burned buying some software for several hundred pounds that had no demo and turned out to be utter crap. So i ended up downloading cracks for any other expensive software that had no demo to avoid wasting money again. I got to know some cool hackers via usenet and just stayed on the edges of the scene ever since.

Now i still download stuff from "the other place" to try out and i still buy the stuff i use. In the past year i've bought lots of software including Alchemy, Serum, Komplete 9, Presswerk, Studio 1, Ableton Live, Bitwig and the best thing i've ever bought, a Panorama P4 keyboard. And no, i'm not rich, rather the exact opposite due to a long term illness and not being able to work for the past 6 years.

Still miss my Amiga 4000 though

Wall of text crits you for 5000. You died.

 

this dude knows what hes talking about...a few of you need to stop being so ignorant and listen sometimes...

Sure, you have to factor piracy in when you start a dev business nowadays but when you have people thinking that software is ALL PROFIT then id imagine it makes it even harder...

 

Simply lets say it with the words of my favourite songwriter who said in an interview in the mid eighties "You are not living if you are not bootlegging"
OK, it was about bootlegs of live gigs and not warez but its easy to adapt! The core of this statement is simply that its normal to fuck everybody without scruples if you can benefit somehow.

 

I was asking myself about piracy, software dev and such some days ago.

Last dongles are not cracked...and probably never will because it needs human work hours, not only faster computers to do it.
And no team/individual is up to the task (RIP Gouda).

Even last non dongled U-He PC softs are not on the scene. And probably, not anytime soon.
Reveal Sound Spire is getting more protection code than sound code. And may join the U-He team protection brigade (U-He provide some "advice" on KVR forums to devs, about protection).

That's on the audio scene protection side.

But there are business models growing, like Adobe monthly fee to use their softs, cloud, getting updates...
This business model started from them, and now is spreading all over the place.

At first, softwares where not protected at all. Then came serials. Then authorization (phone, net...). Then rental. And finally, remote hosting (thanks to high data transfer and low lag).

I see the pattern clearly : it will end like music. You will pay a fee every month to get more choice, options.
But at the end, you own NOTHING. Not even a copy of anything. Just pay to use.

When there was a physical copy and serial, you OWNED your copy. Now you own nothing. Just plain nothing.

Company close ? Bye bye authorize server. You paid for a music service, created a bunch of playlist of your favorite artists ? Dead.
Facebook said you breached TOS ? They close your account, and you lost years of pictures, posts, contacts...
Your government say you are a bad citizen ? They close your virtual existence, and you are dead in the real world.

Because you own nothing. Welcome to the connected world.
Softwares, like anything in the world, are going virtual. Like money. And may be our life soon...

My advice : buy a powerful gun and a lot of ammo. Because it is probably the only thing that will save you in the "Future"

 

I would like to know how many people would have bought the software they pirated if it wasn't for free.
Same with music.
A lot of apps wouldn't get noticed if it wasn't pirated. A lot of bands wouldn't make a living without the free publicity either.
A lot of people use the pirated version as a test drive. Then they do buy it.
I'm sure the strong percentage of people who pirate a piece of software would not have paid for it at all anyway. (PT, Waves Platinum/Diamond/Mercury, NI libraries, etc.)
One thing I won't do is subscription software. MS office started a bad trend that I hope will backfire and end soon.

 

I have thought of this question though (I have purchased about 400-500 bucks of software in the last month or two and thats quite common for me so let that be said first), I am in no way a software guru but, video games now a days are huuuuge productions ya? I am assuming far more complicated than your average VST and expensive to make in terms of man hours on the clock. So why are they 59.00 at their highest price? I think this is a much more fair price and if vsts were more common to be found around this price point the increase in sales would make up for the massive price drop imo. Lots of people who do steal so to speak do so because some compressor is 250 dollars. What the hell? 250 dollars can buy u a lot of stuff(or food if your like 90% of musicians and not pumping in cash by the truckload) thats a hard choice for many.

 

And thanks to that behavior, society is going downhill.

Humans are the worst animals.

 

I think the entire world is in a lot of trouble, and I'm not saying that to be sarcastic. Unemployment and the cost of living are both rising. It's a combination of technological advancement and overpopulation. I don't see any solution except either war, a change to the "capitalist" system, or the bankers continuing to play games with the "global economy" to hide the debt so countries can keep printing more worthless paper $$$. There is no way the current system can continue, most of the world is already bankrupt, and it's getting worse. Don't believe those phony employment numbers, unemployment is rising (there's a lot more to it than just whether someone has a job or not--what kind of job!). Don't believe people are better off, because it is the wealthy that are better off, 90% of the world is getting poorer and poorer. I guess people are going to have to start living in cubicles and eating styrofoam. LOL

 

I cant see the software culture independent from a model based on communication power, to mean dominant ideas are validated because of their popularity.
In fact, I see that the popular software culture is the technical translation of a model of communication -adaptation of it, but in a situation by which the tool has become as important as the message or idol.I also think that there is a distinction to be made btw popular and highly skilled outputs.

Dominant Production Oriented Software(DPOS) resides on the culture of the factorial.This culture core hosts the idea that any business model relies on revenues as on reputation (like whores really!).
The scale determines how administrative decisions could be taken.This fact is about the surface of the things, the impact of how masses of users can be aligned to a businesses model because their dependency to standards, has nothing to do with the real trends from professional companies that don't give a fuck on YouTube clicks, mostly coz they rely on their own developers, who will program how a company will be distinguished from its competitors , so the mushy lay public reaction.With pirate software, you can't attempt to a water splash scene 13 million points 4k,stereoscopic without running into issues.I mean, elites live on caviar, not on piracy, but masses live on culture,to mean the post production state of the message!

I think piracy is here to amend software' s vulnerability like viruses are contributing to the inmuno-system records, type of individual local memory-placenta-line phenomena.I really believe where there is attention, chances are that individuals might attempt to emulate, improve or tweak the convention for profit or challenge, so piracy is here to question or establish a parallel market.My dream is a market of synthetic fakes for everything really.(Sample replay----!)

I also think that the media industry is a widespread convention based on how credibility is paid, therefore historical in its reach (that type of convention by which the skilled class take care of the articulation of the message).

So, just jumping few slides and being a bit tired of how x to -y or x to z to y are applied to a binary universe of outputting, I'm just willing to join the real future, media ubiquity at discuss, by which a program not anymore called software can be interfaced on biological means for root experience, like in "Total recall" the novel-movie. So you don't spend your time graduating at a given university with random results, because you or your parents in the procreation process have slot you with it , as slots of experience might be implemented at any time, really.So the weird line btw the skilled and audience might fade, you could always buy the ultimate demiurge role, as far as it might be a playing role, while perhaps your biology might determine the tolerance to the program.

 

There is a sort of biological mechanism by which competition renders mutation, stages of change that grade from harmful to brilliant so often sourced from defensive response.
Popular software - (media in general) has seen the light in defensive headquarters.
Not taking the warrior perspective ( not my role really )

 

Maybe Reaper would be an example? They ignore the security issue and bank on their goodwill from the community (and improving the daw itself). Their model tends to attract pirates to legitimize. My 2 cents.

 

You would have a hard time finding sources supporting the theory that piracy has improved any aspect of commercial software development.On the contrary, for obvious reasons, there is a wealth of articles supporting the idea that piracy is a global threat. The role of piracy in the digital era goes beyond companies’ losses, it is a sociological phenomena that creates a type of culture, sort of unseen, around the concept what is the value of a given asset.

On the practical side of things, I get stuck while trying to spot what piracy brings to the software itself. I guess that piracy has been a sort of upper level stress test for programs showing code bugs so making clear their vulnerabilities.Im thin in my argumentation. Perhaps, piracy is that jeopardizing factor that creates environmental pressure on companies aligning them in a sort of natural selection alley of the fittest. I'm also thinking about piracy as a sublevel market of fakes, developed anywhere, relocating the technological hot spots around the world, perhaps in the Johannesburg slums featured in District 9, so the array of possibilities is more open to the final users when deciding how much to pay, for what and to whom. The tension btw interests is very interesting.

 

You nailed it about credit card Virtual money, virtual music, virtual synths/effects...
And i follow you about not owning digital goods. A friend of mine sold all his mangas, DVDs, CDs...and bought most of them in digital Apple Store He was bored having a whole wall (sorry) full of mangas, and another half one of DVDs/CDs.
As you don't want to loose your playlists, content and such, you go with the big guys : Apple, NetFlix,Google...
As you don't want to loose your plugins auths, you got with Waves, NI...

I think it is a big part of why some devs still use serials. It makes ppl more confident about the future, not only a matter of dongle/authorize