Poll: Does your startup use pirated software? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Does your startup use pirated software?

29 pointsvaksel55 comments

Do you have any pirated software on any of your startup related hardware?

Not only do I not use any, but in thinking about this question I realized that the only client apps I care about are Firefox and the shell. Everything else I use is online. If there was a way to get a shell in Firefox (which there probably is, somehow) I would be fine with a computer that only ran one app. Which means Andreessen's vision has now happened; at least for n = 1.

Desktop sw companies are about to discover a variant of Wilde's remark: the only thing worse than being pirated is not being pirated.

Desktop sw companies are about to discover a variant of Wilde's remark: the only thing worse than being pirated is not being pirated.

I'm guessing you've probably never sent a greeting card with a Strawberry Shortcake on it. The company that makes those, American Greetings, sold $1.5 billion dollars worth of product last year. Much of it was paper, although they also have an online division which charges a lot of people a lot of money to send birthday cards. (I only know this because my mom says she pays $50 a year for the animated flash cards she mails me all the time.)

What relevance does this have for desktop software? Simple: it should remind you that there is an entire universe of users out there who do not have Paul Graham's problems. Many of these users have problems which can be solved best by desktop software. Those users will keep desktop software companies in business for a while. (Did I mention one point five billion dollars of paper greeting cards? And this is HOW many years after email?)

As long as I'm on the subject, ubiquitous net connectivity gives us desktop developers some interesting options against piracy. One is moving value from the client to the server. I do it a little these days (for non-piracy reasons), and if I can figure it out I'm sure the rest of the industry can.

You can't pirate a desktop app that requires connecting to a server to function (+) any more than you can pirate Basecamp by downloading Firefox.

+ Edit for clarity: I don't mean in the sense of "phone home", I mean in the sense of "value is provided by code or data which only exists on the server". Think WoW: without connectivity its the world's most expensively engineered paperweight.

People like your mom may use computers differently than people like me, but the difference isn't random. It's more of a time-shift. E.g. I start using desktop computers in 1980, they're ubiquitous 15 year later; I start using email in 1985, it's ubiquitous 15 years later; I get a t1 in 1996, broadband is ubiquitous 15 years later; etc.

That's why the adapted Wilde quote applies. I didn't say desktop sw will instantly disappear, just inexorably.

Right, but email is ubiquitous now, and people still buy paper greeting cards to send to people. Not because they don't use email -- most greeting cards buyers do use email. But they get something out of a paper greeting card that they cannot get out of email. (Some of them get it out of an electronic greeting card, some not so much.)

I have six online competitors to my desktop application that I know about. They're made by wonderful people. Some of them are even free.

Many of them show ads for my product and they're, empirically, the best places for me to put ads.

(Google will helpfully let you see what websites are making you money. Other AdWords users should really get to be friends with the Placement Report. Fascinating stuff there. Tangent over.)

Given the choice, today, between a no-install, free online application which is staring them in the face and clicking to another website, downloading something, installing it, running it, playing around, clicking purchase, reaching for the credit card, typing in their details, and inputing a license key, a few hundred people have said "Oh, easy -- I want the downloaded one."

Why is that? There are a couple of reasons (which you would be intensely bored about because you've presumably never had to create bingo cards for 25 people), but it boils down to "The experience of using the desktop application sucks a lot less than the experience of using the web application, for at least some users". They get something out of the desktop version that they couldn't get from the web version, and voted with their wallet.

That's just the view from my little, teeny wedge of the economy. Are all similar wedges going to inexorably vanish? Probably, if you come at it from the assumption that everyone will eventually come to work like you. To misquote another Englishman: "There are more needs in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are answerable by the types of products you yourself buy."

Greeting card companies are still so profitable because generally inkjets can't match their quality. It's not going to be email or the web that kills their current business model, it'll be higher-res printers.

I bet a fair share of desktop software persists soley because of how awkward it is to print from the browser. (The reason no one realizes that the URL, page number, and timestamp can be removed is entirely because of the unnecessary complexity of the UI.)

If Mozilla, Google, or Apple made their printing interface dramatically better (which would be synonymous with making it dramatically simpler) they might be able to win a surprising number of IE users. The correlation between technical proficiency and a penchant for hardcopies seems roughly inversely proportional. While, for instance, my parents don't see much additional value in using Chrome over IE for browsing, they'd probably use it exclusively if it made printing significantly more comfortable.

That's why paper greeting cards now come with sound chips that play back Hannah Montana when you open them.

See? One step ahead!

The shell is kind of just a launcher for additional programs though. So seems only fair that you count the other local programs you run (maybe just ssh?).

Yes, true. I use the standard Unix utils. Sounds weird to call them desktop apps though. They feel more like part of the OS.

I think of the desktop as something that got put on top of Unix in OSX, and terminal windows as holes in it.

I think of the desktop as something that got put on top of Unix in OSX, and terminal windows as holes in it.

Yes! I've been saying "put a hole in your GUI and get back to basics" for a decade now to quizzical looks. Sweet validation.

I noticed at work recently that despite having gigantic muli-monitor setups, everyone had the same apps open. About 6-8 terminal windows, 3-6 gvim/emacs windows, and Firefox. Seems like a waste of all that graphics hardware to me, but I guess that's what we find productive to use...

Come on, you can use only one application for you computer. Its name is Emacs :D (yes, Emacs can use to show images and play music. I would guess porting something like Gecko into would be possible. In that case, why bother a separate browser?)

Not just no, but hell no. I sell software for money, and I will shut down before I steal from somebody else in the same business.

When I need commercial software, I either pay the money for it or I do without. There are great options for doing without these days: much of what you really need is OSS, and if you absolutely have to have something, well, you're a programmer and gcc is free last time I checked. Get writing, chum.

If you're thinking "But it would take me, like, a thousand man-years to make something as good as Photoshop", well, there is always the "Sell your labor to someone, use it to buy the ridiculously-less-expensive-than-one-thousand-man-years product" option.

I haven't used pirated software in pretty much my entire adult life, though I was pretty involved in the warez scene when I was a kid and ran a Commodore 64 BBS. It would never cross my mind to use pirated software today.

I use approximately 90% Open Source software, and the remainder is bought and paid for (though often quite old...the last Microsoft Office version I bought was Office '97, though I haven't had a call to use Office in 5 years, at least). I also buy the cheapest version of stuff. Like I have Vista Home Basic on my dual booting PC, since I spend maybe one afternoon per week in Windows, and never doing anything complicated.

So, no. I don't use pirated software. Even when I worked in an office that had full MSDN subscriptions for everyone, I used almost no proprietary software anyway, so I'm certainly not going out of my way to dig up pirated copies of the stuff. My workflow is simply built around Open Source tools.

I buy the software that I use a lot, but as a startup, I end up doing a million different things and sometimes I need a piece of software that is too damn expensive (over a hundred dollars).

I just cannot justify buying one of these if I am only going to use it to modify a few files and then leave it on the shelf for 10 months. If I there was a pay-per-use or pay-per-day, then that might be a different story.

(over a hundred dollars)

You are literally the first consultant I have ever heard in my life who would mention a hundred dollars as if it were a lot of money.

Egads, man, you're a 1st world businessman, not a starving peasant in Africa. If it saves you an hour once a year it should be on the CC without you batting an eye. That's an extra hour of billable time and/or the prospect of more work because you're more efficient than the next guy, right?

He didn't write he's a consultant, but a startup. And that means there is no billable time - you only calculate stuff against your living costs. And then a hundred dollar are no longer an extra hour, but up to 2 extra days. You learn that stuff if you fall on hard times someday - and if you try doing a startup then this is something that occasionally does happen.

Well, anyway, as much as I understand him, myself I still don't work with pirated software. Usually that means I search for OpenSource alternatives and learn to use those.

He didn't write he's a consultant, but a startup.

His profile says he is a consultant, so I sort of assumed that his startup was run concurrently. Thus, he's perfectly capable of selling the time he saves by using productivity-enhancing software, which makes the "It costs money!" objection rather unpersuasive to me.

Its not like I'm telling him rent, ramen, productivity software: pick any two. (Although I would say it.)

OK, I didn't check his profile.

I don't think it's ok anyway to use pirated software. But I don't care that much that it would for example stop me from working with someone who does.

Hey,

Sorry, I have not updated my profile in a long time. I used to be an environmental consultant, but am now a web-start up. So, take that for what you will.

Another thing I try and do is support smaller projects rather than blindly purchasing large corporations' software simply because someone has sent me a file in that format. Happily, open source and free software (google docs, open office, Gimp) is getting better by the minute and is replacing proprietary stuff (office, photoshop etc.)

Cheers,

I agree with you, but the idea that someone might pay per use or per day for software is intriguing. I know some service apps (e.g. Fog Creek Co-Pilot) are built on this model, I wonder if there are any others that have pay as you go pricing models though. I can't think of any reason why it couldn't be done more.

I could offer it for my software fairly trivially. Here's why I don't:

1) Customers hate buying things multiple times, particularly in my niche.

2) Authorizing transactions frequently is friction. I hate friction.

3) I'd rather charge $30 than $5 because $30 communicates that the product is worth $30 and $5 communicates that the product is not worth your time.

4) If I charged $5 it would be unprofitable for me to advertise and Paypal would make much more than ~4% of my sales.

5) I strongly suspect that average lifetime revenue per user would be much lower if I charged per-use as opposed to per-lifetime. If a customer wants to use my software to do an activity tomorrow, and I told her "Its going to cost you money just for tomorrow", she might decide otherwise. If I tell her "Its going to cost you money, BUT you'll be able to do it for the rest of your life for free", then she (empirically) frequently decides to purchase for me.

With all due respect, I think "I need" is a weak excuse.

We'd probably all agree that copyright law is a terrible mess. Still, I don't think that justifies deciding that you get to take what you want and then pay if you like the license terms.

Just to be clear: you can't justify buying the software, but you can justify stealing it.

Maybe jbrun doesn't consider copyright violation to be stealing.

    #include "copying-vs-stealing-permathread.h"

There's the whole "kids who can't afford the games and want to play them anyway" thing that I sympathise with, but for a business it's easy: if you use something to make money, you really need to pay for it/donate/contribute your patches.

One acronym: OSS

Use OSS for as much as possible!

Obligatory linkage: http://www.linuxalt.com/

Another one: http://www.osalt.com/

Yeah, I'm finding gedit with a textmate-like dark theme is a better Textmate than Textmate!

My parents founded a PC software startup in ~1983, that lasted for ~15 years or so before dying from second-system-effect. They were always quite anal about paying for software, especially my mother -- with her residual objectivism, she even believed in moral rights for software.

When I was cleaning out the old apartment, I found several treasure troves of software and licenses. It was depressing to stumble upon at least a quarter-million dollars (unadjusted for inflation) -- embodied in small stacks of shrinkwrapped paper and enormous piles of obsolete media.

Most of the software we use is produced by small shops, is open source, or is SaaS. A lot of big name software simply does more than we need it to (price isn't usually an issue).

Only software I really really had to buy was Flash, since I was using it heavily in my UI. At around 700 euro it was a really painful purchase to make. Luckily for everything else I've been able to use open source, or stuff that comes with Leopard.

My TechNet subscription gets me Windows and Office for practically nothing. That alone is huge. Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, etc., is free. VirtualBox or VMWare Server, also free.

My OS X came from the Bay. I will buy a copy of Snow Leopard eventually.

Does anybody have valid Microsoft licenses but resorts to downloading from torrents/newsgroups because you can't get their proprietary MSDN downloader to work on Vista?

I pirated Windows XP and put it on a machine for which I own an XP license, because the legitimate copy I have just wouldn't work. I tried to do it honestly, I really did.

I use Linux now.

I can't afford the liability.

For what I need, all commercial alternatives are worse. Some considerably worse. Why would I waste time even downloading them from the net?

The startup I work for does not. 60% of our desktops are Linux, the rest Mac OSX or XP which are legal. Our work is primarily in Eclipse or Emacs, our servers all run Debian our phones are Asterix. We use OpenOffice/NeoOffice as much as possible. We probably have a few copies of MS Office legally, but the only major software license we have is Solidworks.

We are mostly on FOSS and we don't have Windows. Thus the question of Pirated Software don't really arise. Mac software that we've to buy are few and so we can afford them easily.

There is absolutely no need anymore:

1. OSX comes free with every mac.

2. Textmate is the best, and it's very cheap.

3. Omnigraffle is worth every penny.

For just about everything else you could possibly need, open source has a category killer.

Strange as it may seem...

1. Not everyone uses a mac (and OSX is hardly free).

2. Not everyone uses Textmate (and very cheap is relative).

3. What the hell is Omnigraffle?

Point being, not everyone uses the same set of software as you...or maybe it's just late and I'm grumpy :)

1. Linux comes free with every Internet.

2. vim or emacs is the best, and it's very free.

3. There is no 3.

FTFY

Might I add that Ubuntu for all its quirks is a very reliable and easy-to-use OS. Oh VIM is always a win in my book.

Yes, I do steal. :)

Python, Linux (Ubuntu), darcs (source code control), apache, mysql, php, subscriptions to MSDN and Apple Dev. (allmydata.org)

No. We're mainly open standards oriented - which means a mix of FOSS and licenced proprietary software.

As much as I hate to answer this, its true.

Google Docs. Google Apps. Gimp.

Liars, all of you. :P

Nice try. ;)

What pirated software do you all use?

Everything Microsoft. I am so damn tired of paying for Windows every time I buy a computer [I probably own about 10-15 copies of Windows by now], that I believe I'm entitled for everything Microsoft makes.

Why do I even care about Microsoft software? Because our customers do.

I also believe Adobe owes me Photoshop, a letter with apologies plus one of their programmers should become my personal bitch for a week - for all the damage they've done to me with flash and acrobat reader. Sadly, we bought a copy of CS3, because my partners didn't feel this way.

I don't look at using software you've paid licenses for is piracy. My laptop came with Vista, I've installed Ubuntu on it and the Vista restore disc doesn't work in a VM. If I download and use another copy of Vista, it isn't piracy.

You can get all the free and legal Microsoft software (you even get two MSDN support calls) you want from Microsoft BizSpark. It's really easy to sign up.

Hmm, let's see. Things that I actually use frequently:

  * Textmate
  * VMWare Fusion
  * OmniGraffle
  * Microsoft Office
  * SciTools Understand
  * IDA Pro
  * Visual Hub
  * Little Snitch
  * Windows XP
  * ScreenFlow

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