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Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

It makes little sense as there is already a good, reasonable and convincing explanation: software companies want to maximize income.

In any case, software piracy seems to be a thing of the past, except a few notable pieces of desktop software (Windows, Office, some Adobe software). Everything else moved to the web, for better or worse, where piracy is practically non-existent.

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Video game piracy is very much alive and well, with some triple a title exceptions. Not that that is effecting poverty at all. And, anyway, you don't really need new software. You can do fine with ten year old video editors and word 2007 if you just want to get something done.

That's interesting that you talk about videogames because, in Brazil, a good wage is about $400 per month, but videogames cost about $40. So if you're a child, you can't really buy them as they're too expensive. And I don't even talk about the price of a computer or worse, a game console.

For that matter, there are open source options for most of the relevant productivity software categories.

ADDED: Not sure the objections to this statement. If I needed to work on Word files, I'd almost certainly use LibreOffice rather than a 2007 vintage copy of Word. Certainly the open source software isn't always as good as the proprietary software but it's often a better choice than doing without or using versions long out of support.

The older, non-web versions of most of those things are still available to pirate. I’d find it hard to believe that the marginal improvements found in the online versions would have any significant impact on the poverty reduction effects of even having a decade-old version of things like the Office Suite or Photoshop.

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