While your honesty is commendable I'm also sad to hear what you're saying. Personally I have a very hard time understanding how you justify taking someones intelectual property and not paying for it. As a small time 100%
unsuccessful developer myself (deservedly so). I'm trying to understand where you're coming from.
I can understand the
challenge of hacking being a driving-force, but the actual distribution of other people's work is a bit harder to fathom. Especially so for a platform like the iPhone where the majority of developers are small-timers sweating over these software-projects, trying to make a buck following their dreams. These aren't power-hungry megalomaniac multi-billion-companies these are regular guys like yourself dreaming of making a living from creating iPhone apps...
To my knowledge nobody in this thread said they distributed peoples apps illegally. And I find it hard to believe that you cannot see how people can 'steal' something, do you live on another planet? At the end of the day we are commiting a crime and in doing so take full responsibility for any repercussions surrounding that.
Another point to make is that I highly doubt pirates take any significant revenue from developers in such a way to make the whole app development process pointless. Lets be fair, there are over a million apps in the app store. Surely if piracy was a major issue and a terrible drain on revenue to developers they wouldn't do it? This is my understanding of it.
@icewing: I am not an iPhone developer but I am a Windows platform software developer of 5 years. To me, piracy is part of the game. I see no problem with someone taking something I make and releasing it for free publically.
The amount of people that would actually pirate it would be so insignificant that it has no bearing on the money I make from legitimate sales.
I refuse to implement serious software protection as it is more hassle than worth. If more software developers went down this route you could almost guarantee that a lot of problems with software would be solved over night due to the fact that a piece of software isn't being protected by someone elses poorly written code.
That being said, I do implement some form of licensing purely to maintain the fact that someone is purchasing a product from me and it still needs to be monitored.
I don't think this thread will go anywhere but into a huge debate on morals and the laws behind piracy and how you wont get any presents for Christmas if you pirate apps.
People can do what they want, you cannot stop them.