Usually it takes me more than 3 minutes to fill out the necessary forms, though I tend to be slower at that than most people.
But chances are, the amount of time spent looking for alternatives is negligible. I'll have already done a google search and asked friends for recommendations, so I'll have several different options available immediately in firefox tabs.
I'm not completely against paying for software, but it has to really be worth it. The article says that it has to be better than all the free alternatives, which is true, but it has to be better enough to be worth the price you ask for it.
True, and that is a very valid reason for avoiding commercial software.
I was however questioning the suggestion that the reason he doesn't use commercial software is due to the difficulty/time consuming nature of purchasing said software.
The other concept is that developing good spending habits can help you save money all the time. If I get it into my head that $30 is cheap to spend on a tool for comparing text files, I may also think $30 is cheap to spend for a DNS client, and an SSH client, and a text editor, and a compression/decompression utility, and suddenly I've spent $150 on basic applications for a single PC.
But people have no trouble paying for real life stuff. It's just software that people just will not buy if they can at all avoid it. And while that includes me, I cannot come up with a satisfactory explanation.
I actually have made a conscious effort to avoid buying stuff I don't need, long before PG wrote his essay about it.
I will pay for a bed, because I know that I don't want to sleep on the floor and I can't make a bed myself. I won't pay for a chair, because I have a piano bench and a few blankets that work fine, so long as I maintain a good posture. I may pay $1 to download a song from iTunes even though I already have it on a CD somewhere, because it's faster and easier to do that than it is to dig up the CD and rip the mp3.
Very often when you're looking for tools such as Beyond Compare, you're looking to solve an immediate problem, in the next 5-10 minutes. For a programmer asking a question like "show me the difference between two text files" you are probably be expecting an immediate solution. If you're using unix, all you may need is a page that tells you to try 'diff -u file1 file2'. For a problem that straightforward, a programmer will tend to be suspicious of someone charging $30.
The average time from clicking checkout to finishing paying for the last 5 or so pieces of software I've bought has been less than 3 minutes.
How long do you spend finding your alternatives?