5 years after a change in attitude

You are here5 years after a change in attitude

By chri - Posted on 31 July 2008

It has been approximately 5 years I finished using stolen or pirated software. I must admit: I love it!
I love the look on the face of others when they hear I have no illegal software on my machine.
I love the feeling of being legit with all that software.
I love to help others do their first steps in this uncommon world.
And no, I love my money and don't spend it when it's not necessary.

It's all about the attitude.

The most difficult part is the attitude that needs to change.
My previous attitude was to look for a well known brand, download the software, crack it and play with it. If it could do what I needed it for I kept using it. But what with all the unused features? What with the price of this software? That's not important, it's "free" says the thief.

Like with everything in this world there are different options you can choose from. But do we have the choice with software?

Sure we have. I usually see two different options: a) use open source software or b) find an alternative that is worth it's price.
Many (almost all) open source software packages are available for free. Many are even of a great quality, but finding the right packet is difficult. There is a great site around called osalt. It's a huge list with well known commercial software and their similar alternatives in the open source world. There is a short description and a list of supported operating systems. Be sure to check out this site and find what you need.

In the rare case it is possible that you can't find what you need, just look around for other software that is less expensive. Dare to try free beta's, usually when pre-ordering you get a reduction.

aether - Mac OS X

On my Mac I have three commercial software packages that need to be payed for. The first one is Mac OS X, but this one I payed for when buying the computer.

The second one is VMWare Fusion. When I was in then need for a hypervisor on my Mac the only open source alternative was Q. Unfortunately it had a huge performance impact on my machine. So I tried Fusion's beta program. The product worked very well and a few months before the final release there was a 50% off from the price of $80 making it $40 or €30 (by then).
Right now you can use VirtualBox as alternative, but that wasn't available yet when I needed it.

The third commercial software is called Bibble. I couldn't find a good open source alternative that ran on Mac and Adobe Lightroom 2 with it's $300 is really to expensive for me. So I bought Bibble that delivers the required features for $130 or €83.

What about the rest? It's fairly simple here's a short list:

Browsing - Mozilla Firefox
Email - Mozilla Thunderbird
Office Suite - OpenOffice.org (or NeoOffice in the past)
Chat - Adium
Launcher - Quicksilver
Notification - Growl
Video - VLC
Burning - Burn
(s)FTP - Cyberduck
Code editor - Smultron
Backup - iBackup (not open source, free for personal use)
...

sws00448 - Microsoft Windows

This is the computer I have from my company. I'm 'forced' to use many commercial software but they do pay for it. So it's not really my problem. Let's skip that boring non-Office or administrative software if you want.

Browsing - Mozilla Firefox
Full-Disk Encryption - TrueCrypt
Secure Erasing - Eraser
Office Suite 2- OpenOffice.org
PortableApps - Portable Apps
Chat - Pidgin
Launcher - Launchy
Video - VLC
Burning - Infrarecorder
(s)FTP - FileZilla
Code editor - Notepad++
Shell - Cygwin
...

neptunus - Linux / Ubuntu

No need to make a list here. For all the software you want just got to the "Add/Remove Software" menu item. In contrary to some other Operating Systems you can really add software in this place.