swingerofbirch said:
I was having an interesting discussion with someone tonight about moral relativism versus dogmatic morality.
I have gone legal when it was a pain to do otherwise. If I already had gone to the trouble you had to acquire FCP I would probably just keep it.
I guess I would employ moral relativism and think about how Apple allowed illegal options trading by letting employees pick the day of the month they wanted to cash in. They also make billions yet pay their Chinese laborers a very small amount every month and force them to live in a factory in a large room with no privacy. Steve Jobs has been fighting to destroy a historical site which he owns in Woodside, California for years now.
But like I said: I was questioning my use of moral relativism. Not saying it's right. But you have to wonder if no one else is playing by the rules, is it moral to myself to not give myself that advantage?
Also, why should Apple be allowed to rest on protection from the government to prohibit sharing of their programs. That brings up a whole other set of questions. Shouldn't they have to give you a compelling reason to buy their version of the product?
I am not in the market for $$$$ software. If I was, would I feel better doing it legit? Yeah definitely. I think it depends though on where you are.
If you put a kid in school that will fail if he doesn't cheat, he's in a bad spot. Kids need to be able to realistically succeed.
That's the hard thing in this society. To some people, you could move the decimal point one spot to the left, and that's the relative impact it would have on them. To someone like the CEO of Exxon you could move the decimal point 6 places to the left and see how much it would look to him.
To some $700 is a drop in the bucket. To some it's two months' rent.
Just raising the questions. I imagine I'll get flamed.
But if Apple was moral and paid their workers a higher wage, new iPods would cost $600!!!
😱 [/sarcasm]
Yes, in a way, you're right. I do agree with you.
I'm like the OP. I want to go legal in some cases, but only with software I think is worth it. I'm going to buy Adobe Lightroom once it's released, because even Beta 3 has been a real treat to use. That's got to be several hundred dollars.
🙂
However, I don't know if I'm ever going to buy MS Office. The question of "Do I need to play by the rules if the company who makes the product has a lower set of moral standards?" I mean, I'd hate a company like MS, Starbucks, Walmart (!!), Adidas (!), Nike, etc, to be able to hide behind the law and complain when we do something bad, but then turn around and do much worse than us, and get away with it all. I also don't use it, so I'd happily delete it if I was ever short of harddisk space.
The other program I pirate, but WOULD pay for is Adobe Photoshop. I'll get it legally one day, but since I only use one feature in that program right now, I'm gonna need to get better at it before I buy it.
😱 It costs waaaaay too much for 1 feature. Otherwise, I'll delete it and just purchase Photoshop Elements or something.
However, I'll continue to buy what I think is good. I bought Graphic Converter as well since it only costs $30 and can open like 100 different types of image files.
🙂 I also paid for an upgrade of iLife for my 12" PB because I was still on iPhoto 2 and such, and wanted to be on version 5.
