DRM is another big issue. I think it is pretty immoral idea (since it feeds the lust for power and control), and is just a method of control hungry corporations. This becomes even worse when it goes so far as restricting hardware even (there was a good article about it).

First, you can ask yourself other moral issues, indeed the moral “kashroot” of the product or vendor. The way they treat customers, employees and competitors may be counted as the moral values of the software maker. Does the company engage in questionable tactics to gain income and market share? Do they pay fair wages? Do you even agree with their EULA? My pesonal dislike of MS products starts here on the moral issues, way before we get to the prices and question if there is really any financial loss linked to what they love to call “piracy”.

Second, The definition of “stealing” is not really clear here. You can then ask yourself about the moral dilemma thus:

* It costs nothing to copy the software (it’s not a physical copy I stole and now can’t be used by another). Is this comparable to stealing your neighbour’s ass?

* That vendor would not get my money as a paying customer anyway. Is he REALLY losing money by my action?

* That vendor may be turning a blind eye because like a good drug dealer he prefers I get addicted to the “free” trial and then buy his product’s next version, or just profit from the fact I’m inadvertently helping them make it the de-facto standard in businesses etc. leading them to a comfortable monopoly.

The last, oddly enough, appears to have been the unofficial MS approach for a long time. Only in the last year they finally drew up a chart that analyses why Vista is not taking off. As competitors they list Linux and MacOS but not in the first places, those were taken by Windows XP followed by “free” illegal versions of XP and Vista that are easy to find online. How do you compete with a system that is so perfectly compatible and impossibly price-competitive? If you can’t do it with price, you have to do it with punishment – they claim they can’t see a third or fourth option, so that usually where they are trying to go. The same way that music publishers and producers don’t get the danger of publicity backfire when they sue fans instead of finding a new business paradigm. This is why the music production business is in trouble, while artists and fans are actually moving on, quite happy with the new evolving business models, while DRM and other tricks are dying out.

MS will not admit it, but they are starting to learn from other companies (especially Google), how to stay in business over the next decade.

My personal answer to all the above arguments is that like you, I stay away as much as I can from immorally produced, marketed and priced software, though I admit it’s hard to be “holier than holy”, and have sadly payed for stuff I didn’t care for, and recommended customers to do the same. Evangelizing ideas does not give anyone the automatic right to break the existing laws for them.

Third, regarding (5). Try to separate the Open–Proprietary scale from the price scale. While it may be true some or most of the time, you can easily find examples, where proprietary s/w is not always expensive. Sometimes it’s even provided at zero price, but it MAY come at a high cost to your freedom from a vendor lock-in, and that translates to the money down the road. For instance when you want to grow beyond the limits of a free edition, and bump into the cost of the migration or the upgrade.

On the other hand it could be a uniquely wonderful product that has no FOSS equivalent and is well worth paying for. I can think of several such products. For instance, as a photographer I don’t see any FOSS replacements for Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop that are up to my standards.

The same goes for Free s/w you pay nothing for, compared to the software contracts you may buy from Red Hat or SuSE. Just a few of the many vendors that give you service, stability and continuity for your money.

Regarding “I do not pay money for software, if there is OpenSource analogue” – I just say I prefer FOSS products to proprietary ones, and then list time/money are the secondary consideration.