Ultimately it is your own morality, and whether you want your own work and time to be valued. Whatever you do comes back at you.
Artists started giving away models free to gain popularity and acceptance. It ended up in creating a culture of freebiehunters to whom only "free" is acceptable. It is the Artist or the Game maker who is hurt in the long run. He/she made his/her labor freely available. Crying over the lack of saleability of own work and poor market price won't remedy the situation.
When small companies like TGC create things "free" they offer versions which are less than full. They are meant to give a good taste of what you can expect and work in the nature of a sample. TGC module is better in this respect since most other companies give evaluation versions that usually expire within a month. And now you can even get a free version of DBPro.It is my personal opinion that those who continue to use the "free" version for years, are doing so because they are not serious about the software. Twenty dollars is not a huge sum.
As far as Bond1 said about the casettes, if we take the opposite argument to its fruition then everybody would be in jail. Why, I have rarely met an educated person who has never shared or passed around a book or novel they liked. However, doing so, actually breaks the licenses and copyrights, for people who did not pay for the books are reading the books and receiving the same enjoyment that the purchaser did. So, the author is losing his royalty and the publisher, his sale. Libraries are a form of institutionalized and socially approved method of mass copyright infringement.
The culture of piracy is most disturbingly encouraged in modern days even by companies themselves.
I know of quite a few software, where the companies themselves upload torrent packages of their software to different websites which give illegal downloads. They do this to increase the popularity of their software.
Since forbidden fruit is sweeter there are many who go for those torrents and do not download demo versions. Only, every thing is tracked. There have also been instances of bestselling authors in the US going to jail because they themselves were helping the piracy of their books in a bid to increase popularity. Of course, the Publisher got hurt, sued, and won compensation.
There are no Attack Poodles capable enough to monitor the internet and the digital world. Even big companies like Autodesk who actually, keep teams of "Attack Poodles" come up short in many cases. It is not possible to send potential customers to jail. If somebody liked a pirated software, and found that they need it in their work pipeline, then today or tomorrow they will buy the software. Software has a long learning curve, and many people stick knowingly with inferior software because they do not have time to spend learning a superior software, even if free.
My respect to the person who made this post for being both brave and honest. You can always find ways to work around the law, but you can never work around your conscience or the consequences. If sharing devalues a product, and you start the cycle, then tomorrow whatever you create with that product will also fail to find its proper value. This I have seen.
Regards
Cloner
Still moving in circles.
