Oxford: Digital Piracy Benefits Affected Companies

As far as business software goes: duh! If you get young people who can't afford your software hooked on it when they don't make any money, when they do, they will just buy it.

Unfortunately to my dismay math software does not follow this ideal. All the (good) math packages for students cost about $100 each. They are also pirated at an unbelievably high rate. I finally broke down and bought mathematica and I scavenged a copy of Matlab from a research group I worked under, but I wish so much that they were free. If I was a professional and used their software every day to make lots of money I wouldn't hesitate to buy their software for plenty of cash.

A lot of students will even buy the student version of Matlab and then use the pirated version which contains all the extra packages they need for their homework.

Embedded compiler software is even worse. Their normal software runs in the many thousands of dollars and their "student pricing" is sold at a heavy discount. Unfortunately, a small percentage of a really big number is still a big number for students. I had to get a student version of a compiler toolchain for a project and it was like $300. Which was an order of magnitude cheaper than the pro-edition, but $300 is a lot for a student who will just use something else they got pirated from some other student. If they had gotten me locked in I would probably go on in the future to use their software and chock up that $3000 because It was what I needed.