movida posted at 3:19AM Sun, 01 December 2019 - #4371812

Just as a point of fact: I know quite a few people who have had their initial introduction to one software program or another through using a pirated version and are now paying users for decades.

To quote movida, again, I agree with the above. I may be dating myself, but I remember years ago we had the Adobe Illustrator package and the upgrades were getting pricey. There's no way you could buy and test all the packages (even then they were always like $399 even on sale) so someone gave my dad copies of Corel Draw2 floppys (yes, that's how long ago). We wound up buying the full version of Corel Draw 3 (which I still have complete with it's really well done manuals, and floppys transferred to dvd), and even though we don't do every upgrade cycle (maybe one in three) we're still legit Corel users to this day. Moreover that got us hooked on the Corel video Studio, too.

If it hadn't been for those floppys, I don't know. We probably would have found something open source. We would have dropped Adobe in any event. It just cost too much and we weren't professional users.