I’ve mentioned this a couple of times in recent conversations, so I thought I would state it here:

“I’m not down with pirating software, but I really don’t like buying software either.”

This puts me in a unusual category. Most people I know either buys software or steals it. It is rare that I find the person who will sometimes purchase it, and other times pirate it. Most of my friends fall into the latter category, considering it stupid to pay for anything that you can easily rip off.

As someone who writes code for a living, I find the idea of stealing someone else’s work abhorrent. As a rule, if I don’t want to pay for it, I won’t use it, even if it is easily attainable. On a completely contradictory note, I really don’t like buying software. Plunking down cash for something that I could easily rip off seems like a waste of money.

(I can’t explain this strange thought process.)

I think this explains why I like open source software so much. Open source software is often built by communities of passionate developers who do it for the love of creating software. As a web developer, I favor the open source side of the industry. I’ll pick Linux/Apache/PHP/mySQL over Windows/IIS/ASP.NET/SQL Server any day of the week.

Another contradictory note: there are some pieces of software whose value is so great that I can’t ignore. One such product is UltraEdit. This is an absolutely indispenable tool for my web development career.

Edit: Moved from original willdiaz.com site.