100% agree with this. Every kid in the 2000s pirated Adobe software. It was almost a badge of honor to have every Adobe icon on your desktop.
These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.
If one didn't have access to Adobe in those days and had to instead make do with Paint.net or GIMP, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into media and publishing today (where they now, as you pointed out, bill their companies $1000s to use Adobe's products).
Hate to say it but the difference in output quality between GIMP and Photoshop really shows and can make the difference between your work looking amateur or professional - ie getting your first job.
I know I know, it's about the operator not the tool, but not everyone has the mindset to grind through GIMP's UI and stackexchange troubleshooting forums when there are tutorials for everything Adobe on YouTube. Some of these people can still be great designers.
Or it would have forced the open source tooling to get improved. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. A lot of features in the open source tooling is due to an itch that needed to be scratched. I think without piracy, the open-source software would have had even better feature set.
There is also the ability to run things like Playwright on the edge a la Cloudflare Workers. You can fallback to rendering JS required sites through that and do clientside imagemagick WASM shenanigans on the client once the worker returns direct links to all the images.
Flappy Bird was taken off the store by its author, if you take WhatsApp off the app store, that would be a completely different reaction to Flappy Bird.
No offense, but this statement seems like an ignorant lack of understanding around the issues with the growing problems around urban sprawl and the issues it causes environmentally or otherwise. No one is going to take your countryside home from you, but it’s worth educating yourself on the issues.
Surprising that my personal account, all of which is a truthful reflection of my own lived experiences in both urban and countryside settings, is considered "ignorant."
I'd be interested to explore the reasons and/or psychology behind your judgement.
An apartment in a major us city costs >4x per more per square foot than the adjacent suburban sprawl. Clearly a lot of people realize the value and are willing to take the financial hit to have it.
Is it value, though, that they perceive? Or is the necessity to be in that location that drives prices up? If that's the case, that necessity might not have positive causes either...
What could be more valuable than satisfying a necessity? Your question presupposes some kind of opposition that makes me think you are using words with definitions at odds with the ones I know.
If you define “bigness” of my house as being more value than living next to all my friends in a very walkable city with tons of things to do at any time I want where I don’t need to ever drive my car then sure.
Personally, I’ll take my $500k condo in my very amazing city that is 1000sq ft over a 3500sq ft empty house that is 2 miles from the nearest grocery store.
In my 10 years of this career all of the rockstar programmers I’ve worked with have had a college degree. Not saying there is a correlation, but I’ve only worked with a very small handful of absolute wizards.
These kids learned the Adobe suite and probably became professionals as a result, then purchasing the software legally for their entire company. Piracy isn’t bad, in fact, it probably makes these companies money in many cases.