Very true, the background behind the article though is from a long set of arguments on iDevGames' (and pretty much every other Mac games site) forums and chatrooms about software theft in the light of Halo's eventual release on the Mac. Several (usually younger) posters claimed they were on the moral high ground when downloading Halo, because it was owned by Microsoft, so it's ok to steal it. Its relevance is more towards apps than games, although not totally. Its aim was to try and provoke discussion, which seems to have worked.
You could probably write a very large book on all the possible motivations, moral arguments etc. behind software theft. If you let everyone download pirate copies of it, you could probably make a fortune on the lecture circuit as your book would become the standard overnight.
Hopefully the article would be pretty obvious to Linux users. If you've already made the choice to go with an alternative rather than just copy the 'standard' then you've probably already worked it out for yourself;)
To put the article in context btw. It resulted after observing a big row on iDevGames forums and chat about software theft and whether it's morally correct or not when it's a Microsoft game, brought about by the release of Halo for the Mac (pretty much the same argument on several Mac sites, it gets boring pretty quickly). Most of the iDevs users are relatively new Mac game developers, so I hope this article brings up a new issue for discussion for them.
As far as the morals of software theft are concerned, I'm a developer, so I have a biased opinion, but I hope I was successful in keeping the article away from any discussion of the morals of the issue and just on the specific effect that I wished to bring up for discussion. (if not, then I'm a terrible article writer and I'll go back to games instead;)
Slashdot Mirror
Very true, the background behind the article though is from a long set of arguments on iDevGames' (and pretty much every other Mac games site) forums and chatrooms about software theft in the light of Halo's eventual release on the Mac. Several (usually younger) posters claimed they were on the moral high ground when downloading Halo, because it was owned by Microsoft, so it's ok to steal it. Its relevance is more towards apps than games, although not totally. Its aim was to try and provoke discussion, which seems to have worked. You could probably write a very large book on all the possible motivations, moral arguments etc. behind software theft. If you let everyone download pirate copies of it, you could probably make a fortune on the lecture circuit as your book would become the standard overnight.
Hopefully the article would be pretty obvious to Linux users. If you've already made the choice to go with an alternative rather than just copy the 'standard' then you've probably already worked it out for yourself ;)
To put the article in context btw. It resulted after observing a big row on iDevGames forums and chat about software theft and whether it's morally correct or not when it's a Microsoft game, brought about by the release of Halo for the Mac (pretty much the same argument on several Mac sites, it gets boring pretty quickly). Most of the iDevs users are relatively new Mac game developers, so I hope this article brings up a new issue for discussion for them.
As far as the morals of software theft are concerned, I'm a developer, so I have a biased opinion, but I hope I was successful in keeping the article away from any discussion of the morals of the issue and just on the specific effect that I wished to bring up for discussion. (if not, then I'm a terrible article writer and I'll go back to games instead ;)