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Comment by muerdeme | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty sweet. My roommates and I couldn't have made it through school without the pirated copies of Matlab floating around.

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Don't do this, really. The Mathworks has a great product and offers tremendous support, training, etc. Beyond that they have always been extremely reasonable in their licensing, e.g. letting me run the Mac version on my laptop at home and the Linux version when I'm at work. There is a student version which costs you less than a lot of textbooks. If you want free then try Sage, R, Octave, etc. Don't ripoff a good company.

I meant that I would have used Sage if I had known about it. I'm certainly not advocating piracy - Matlab is a fantastic product and well worth the money. That part had more to do with the school's horrific IT program than anything else.

Students getting accustomed to using mathworks is far more valuable than the cost of the student version fee. If he goes on to encourage his future employer to get the business licenses/support then this will absolutely dwarf what a whole school full of paying students would bring in.

Also note that in the majority of schools you have already payed to use mathworks (through tuition) if you are in any engineering program. I don't know why it would be so much more ethical to pay twice...

So, if you want to support mathworks/photoshop/etc then you should encourage broke students to get it on their home computers by any means possible. Many of these companies practice this strategy. Thus ends my pricing hypothesis.

Can you mention a company whose official strategy is to have their software pirated by one group of users under the theory that they will make it up with increased legitimate sales? Yes, companies love having students using their software which is why they give huge discounts on the fees.

Paying tuition does not mean that have "paid to use" Matlab unless your institution has actually bought licenses for you to do so. If you are saying, "We were using a floating license paid for by the university and therefore did not need to purchase an additional license." Okay, fine. If you are arguing that because the physics department bought two licenses for lab machines that you somehow have the right to pirate copies without a license then you are mistaken.

Bottom line: I support the good guys, the companies that respect me and help me to do the best work I can. The Mathworks is one of those companies, in my experience.

Bill Gates doesn't support piracy, but if it's going to be pirated it might as well be Microsoft software: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

http://www.news.com/2100-1023-212942.html

baaawwwwwwwwww

Luckily our school had Matlab on the lab computers, it was very useful.

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