Of course I agree that piracy is wrong, both legally and morally/ethically/whatever, but just wanted to comment on piracy is the reason why the software costs so much. I believe that the lost revenue from piracy might have some effect on the price of software, but 1)I think it's really hard (if not impossible) to quanity exactly how much this effect is and 2)Even if you could quantify it, it wouldn't be that much.
I develop software for a living so I have a pretty good idea as to what is involved in developing really big software. From design, to implementation (the actual coding), to testing, to deployment. You have engineers of varying disciplines involved in all these aspects - software, systems, human factors (ie people with PhDs), etc... These folks' salaries aren't cheap! And then you have all the support staff to keep your desktop PC chugging along, as well as the development systems. Then y ou have to keep the copy machine working. You have to pay for the electricity, the printer paper, the pens
![Smilie :) :)](/images/smilies/smile.gif)
The nice lady upstairs who schedules conference rooms for us. Then double all of this for support/maintenance of the product once it's out there. All of this costs alot, say $20 million (I have no idea how much development costs are for Cubase, but that number is in line with my field). Now you have to price your software/support based on how many people you expect to buy the software/support. If there is one customer, they pay $20 million (not unheard of for customized systems). If there are 500 customers, they pay
$40,000. Alot of Software Development software costs this much.
My point is that relatively speaking, music production software really doesn't have that much of a market, so the fixed development costs have to amortized over a fairly small market segment.
My post in a nutshell, Software costs alot to (properly!) develop and IMHO I don't think that piracy (ie lost revenue by folks who pirate) has much of an effect on the final price (not including developing copy protection)
Now back to debugging Makefiles for a system which must compile on both Unix and Linux systems at the same time
legionserial said:
Now the w]ay I see it, it costs that much because of people stealing and pirating software. So technically, I'm not just buying myself a legit copy of cubase, I am also paying for a whole bunch of pirate fuckers to have cubase too. Technically I have bought them a copy of cubase.