I pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the development software I used to learn C, assembly language, etc. This is back on the C64/Amiga 500, before free software was a thing for at home use (the gnu project existed, but I was doing this well before Linux existed). The software was often being sold for multiples of the cost of the (scrounged-together) hardware I'd be running it on.
It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster.
I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.
What about Bill Gates' role in popularizing desktop computers for the whole world, and mostly for free or bootlegged copies of Windows? Apple/Jobs didn't want to do that. Nobody wanted Linux in comparison.
It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster.
I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.