I understand the resentment, but the right course of action must surely be to not upgrade. Instead go with an alternative, such as Mac OS or Linux.
There really is not a good substitute for Quickbooks Enterprise. And I forgot Regex Buddy. I downloaded Patterns off the App Store, but it's a poor substitute. Regexes aren't pretty, but if you are hacking on something a quick regex can do a lot for a little.
EDIT: I just re-read this, and thought it sounded a little too negative toward Pixelmator. I think being a good 60% solution in relation to Photoshop is a huge accomplishment, and that Pixelmator is great software. It is absolutely worth the money. It is a very competent intermediate image editor, and would be $30 well spent for anyone. The criticism is mainly directed toward the lack of some esoteric advanced features, and my curmudgeonly desire to have it work exactly like Photoshop, since that is how I have edited images for the last dozen years.
Well, I guess you can, but you're stretching your ethical credibility.
Stealing is not one of them.
I know I'm beating this horse fairly hard, but it's something that people need to be aware of.
TL:DR; it doesn't matter what semantic games you try to pull, if you're a cheap bastard you're still an ass.
The "IP infringement is not stealing" line is just what people say when they want something for nothing and they don't want to feel bad about inflicting financial damage upon the original author.
That doesn't make any sense. I don't think anybody is seriously arguing in this thread that copyright infringement is correct or ethical - what we're instead arguing is that, despite the best efforts of the *AA groups, "stealing" is a different crime than "copying without permission". The fact that there's a supreme court case backing this line of reasoning up (in plain language, no less) makes this conflation of terms even less forgivable.
Call the crime what it is.
>When I create software and someone "takes away" my ability to earn income from it..
Except if I copy something of yours without permission, I haven't taken away your ability to do anything. And I challenge you to prove otherwise.