I don't think the "pure piracy" model will ever come to pass, but I don't see piracy going away either. The people who seek to eliminate piracy can only do so with modest efficacy by resorting to systems that severely limit freedom and have the implicit assumption that the user is a potential criminal instead of a patron. I respect copyrights the best I can, and I don't see copyright laws disappearing, I'm simply stating that I wouldn't rely on today's model of business for tomorrow when there are clear cracks and a lot of legal question marks and civil disobedience. If nothing else, assume piracy will happen and diversify (i.e. don't risk house and home on CD/print sales).
Trust me, plenty of people thought Red Hat was crazy for "selling" Linux when you could just download the source and compile it yourself. Heh, turns out that building 10,000 packages using a 233 MHz CPU takes a few days, and isn't nearly as convenient as an autoupdate service that works on a whole network of PCs.
Trust me, plenty of people thought Red Hat was crazy for "selling" Linux when you could just download the source and compile it yourself. Heh, turns out that building 10,000 packages using a 233 MHz CPU takes a few days, and isn't nearly as convenient as an autoupdate service that works on a whole network of PCs.