I seriously feel like I’m the last person who still pays for music, movies, books, software and games.

Everyone around me is ripping off one thing or another. One grabs game ISOs, one grabs AVIs of movies that just hit theaters, one’s got a key generator for pretty much any program out there and another has HDDs full of music from newsgroups.

This really gets under my skin, especially when they offer me the free stuff and I turn them down. I’m usually called a sucker for paying for this sort of thing, and that sometimes causes me to go off on them.

You see, as a web developer I deal exclusively in intellectual property and digital property. I don’t produce a tangible product. When a worker produces something that you can touch, then everyone understands that taking it without paying for it (assuming its creator charges for it) is considered stealing. Somehow, when the product in question is digital, then that common sense is lost.

“If I can rip it, if I can download it, if I can copy-and-paste it, then it is mine,” seems to be the mantra of the pirate.

I get paid to produce code, something that can be easily “copy-and-pasted” if you know where to find it. If I was charging for that code, and I found that someone had copied it and then went on to distribute it, I would feel just as violated as if someone took off in my car during the night.

This barely scratches the surface on how much it bothers me, but I should stop myself before I bore you. What do you think, do I take this too personally?

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.