I was fairly supportive of his thoughts until I read at the bottom that he works for Imagination Technologies, makers of the PowerVR chipset and quite possibly the worst company in the world when it it comes to giving any support at all to open source drivers.
After reading that I was struck by a couple of things -- one is that it is hard to feel bad for someone complaining about a bad actor in the software space when they work for a bad actor in the hardware space; two is that even if I have a bad opinion of an employer already, I still think it is bad form to post an article like this with your employer's name linked right at the bottom.
Even though he ultimately concludes that he won't pirate it, it is fairly easy for bad internet "journalists" to twist what he said and involve his employer since he names and links right to them at the bottom of his rant-post. Rant-posts where you invoke even the idea that you may break the law are best made on blogs that do not mention your employer.
I'm not sure my employer has much to do with my free thoughts on my blog, or how sorry or supportive you feel for me. I'm not IMG personified and neither are they a corporate version of me, so you shouldn't overly couple the two things.
I thought the post was pretty clear on a few points: I won't pirate it, because I'm a programmer myself and just goes against what I believe; I actively wanted to pay for it; I want them to make it easy for me to do so.
Yes I'm frustrated, but no, I won't go against what I believe just to get what I want and I actively want to give them the money they ask for. I want that situation to be simple and straightforward for me to resolve and for them to claim their revenue. That should be quite clear, and it also should have nothing to do with who I work for.
That said, since you brought IMG up and how we are at supporting open source drivers, that's something that's overwhelmingly down to our customers and what they want to do. When a customer or partner does want us to open code up, we work with them to make it happen as much as we can.
I think you're more frustrated at Intel than us. You could argue that we should provide an open driver in parallel to our customers, but that wouldn't help you much because of how the drivers have to glue to the rest of the software running and the SoC's systems architecture. So you'd also need support from our customers, so we just punt to them.
We could do better, but I don't think we necessarily do badly there.
That's no excuse. He may be a great guy but the OP's point stil stands. In general we're all great people until we're not. I'm a nice guy but I've been known to be a total asshole like anybody else. Cool guys act like dicks sometimes and a record of being a good guy doesn't excuse one for doing something uncool.
Bill Clinton left us with a surplus. He also cheated on his wife. Still a good president but cheating is a dick move. See what I'm saying (please don't read into it and focus on the wrong thing now)?
There are lots of things about Bill Clinton that I liked and just a few things about him that I didn't, but seriously, I don't think even the most incompetent person in the world could have left us without a surplus in the era that the internet went mainstream.
The internet bubble didn't create the surplus, the "peace dividend" did. After the former Soviet republics became our BFFs, we promptly eviscerated our Cold War military. Combine that with some good growth in the economy (which obviously includes the tech sector) and some welfare reform that Clinton and Gingrich worked on together, and you got a nice surplus.
Throw in Bush-era tax cuts and two wars, and you can say bye-bye to that.
How much did our defense spending decrease? I know that we must have saved a ton of money when Clinton cut the Army nearly in half and when we decommissioned so many of our battleships. I've heard it said that we still spend more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, but I'm not sure what the numbers looked like before the cutbacks.
Edit: I did a little research and I was astonished to find out that welfare programs cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually. I didn't think that something like welfare would make up a significant percentage of the budget. It's over 10% of the federal budget if you include all of the programs that fall under "welfare."
Looking at the statistics, the amount of money spent on welfare didn't significantly increase or decrease during or after Bill Clinton was in office (until our current financial crisis.) I know that he was trying to find smarter ways to spend the money, such as by getting people back to work with education and employment assistance, but how could the reform have added to the surplus if the amount of spending wasn't reduced?
After looking at this site a bit longer, it looks like every category of spending increased each year he was in office. Even though spending increased, there were some areas where he slowed down the rate of increase, which is admirable. But if we increased spending in every area before, during and after his presidency, yet we produced a surplus during his presidency, doesn't that mean the surplus was created by the thriving economy, which was in turn thriving because of the internet boom? I'm not asking to be argumentative, I just don't understand how we can say that our reduced need for defense spending combined with welfare reform caused a surplus when we didn't reduce our spending in either category from 1993-2001.
Edit2: Since I asked a couple of questions. Wouldn't it be more productive to answer them instead of downvoting me? I wouldn't have asked them if I didn't genuinely want someone to explain things to me from their perspective. Why let someone continue to be wrong when given the opportunity to correct it?
Inflation + population growth will result in increases unless you make a conscious decision to cut. So if you leave something alone in the budget, you'd expect it to increase naturally over time. Even if there was no internet boom, and the budget continued to rise, tax receipts would still go up b/c the economy must grow to accommodate all those kids entering the workforce each year. If you hold the line on spending increases, not eliminate the increases but put them below the rate of growth, you'll have a surplus.
I specifically said not to focus on the wrong thing and yours is one of a string of comments that does exactly that. But I am glad you get and agree with my point.
I'll take your word for it that he's a cool guy. And I don't even fault him for working for a company I have a not-so-great opinion of -- it is quite possibly a great place to work for employees and might be the best option to pursue his interests around where he lives. But none of that changes the fact that knowing where he works brings to mind the old saying about people living in glass houses.
> "giving any support at all to open source drivers"
Since when is a hardware company obligated to give support to open source drivers??? Really? Really.
1. A hardware company can choose to sell its products to whatever class of customers it likes. It doesn't have to cater to a particular subset of philosophical adherents, when marketing a product. It might not be realistic to ask a person to pay money for a product, when they can only marshal so many hands from a finite set of costly human resources, to meet the demands of a certain type of customer.
2. It makes sense for a small hardware company to cater to users of for-profit proprietary operating systems, mostly because there's hard incentive for makers of proprietary libraries to support their software in kind (ie: you can enforce an annual contract against Microsoft, but GNU?). This is the exact business model that Microsoft has preyed upon and grown fat off of for years.
3. The open source community has a reputation for taking on all comers. This is to say that when the going gets tough, and there's real demand for something awesome, the open source community will step up and brute force a project into submission. We have a reputation for pulling our own weight when it counts.
I don't think it's correct to frown upon a hardware company because it doesn't cater to open source philosophies. It's not always easy to turn that kind of pie-in-the-sky demand into something that pays the very real bills.
I think it's correct to frown upon a company that espouses vehement animosity towards a hacker community that it could wisely cultivate as a neutral ally, that neither helps nor harms profits. Companies that actively spearhead campaigns of criminal prosecution and litigation against hobbyists that mean no harm (and often increase demand, or frequently support their own demand) ...that kind of behavior is toxic.
In other words:
if people buy your goods, they should feel free to use them as the please, and if they figure out new unintended uses for those goods, great! But that doesn't obligate the maker to now support an unexpected, unplanned emergent behavior, however popular it may be.
They certainly aren't obligated to, but when an employee of a business that does this complains about difficulty using software because of regioning, DRM, or similar, why are you so incredulous that someone points it out?
I used to have a Kyro II. I can attest to not only the complete lack of open source drivers, but also to the absolute crap quality of their Windows drivers. I think I had to reinstall windows after I upgraded it to get the drivers gone. Feels bad, man.
I get that plenty of companies provide decent support for open source drivers, etc., and more power to them, but what planet do you live on where people and/or companies are obligated to just give you stuff?
Shouldn't it be more a case of "ask and be grateful if you get it" rather than "ask and throw a fit when you don't"?
I've personally found that "internet journalists" will twist what you say regardless of whether or not you make any explicit links to your employer. Even if you do the opposite ("My opinions do not represent those of Foobarbaz, Inc."), they'll still do it.
I just wanted to give a counter-point here, to show they're not all bad. Microsoft saved me recently, when (due to my own stupidity) I was in a foreign country without my main computer and I'd forgotten to install Office for Mac, which I needed urgently to finish a presentation. Luckily, I had my license key so I entered it in on their website, and they gave me a link to download the full version of Office. No questions asked. I hadn't even bought it off Microsoft directly in the first place; I'd bought a student version off a third party.
This might seem like a no-brainer feature, but when I've bought software online in the past it's often come with a 30-day download link, and when that link expires you're out of luck. You have to have the forethought to retain the install image to be able to install it in future. So I was actually impressed and grateful to Microsoft for that.
I currently live in Belarus and dealt with the same crap a few days ago. Win 8 pro upgrade offer? Sure, but not for you, pal. Try looking for it at local resellers... Same situation is here with paypal, which makes us register it for different countries. So there I was, buying a VPN to buy Windows. How stupid is that? I've always been confident that internet is one single area. It can not be separated by countries. It is one network with no geography, no boundaries. Itunes music purchase? Yeah, very funny. Google Play books or movies or music? Amazon mp3 store? Nope and nope on every point.
So nope, I'll not give them a single cent until the day they fix their behaviour. And yes, I'll pirate as much as I can, even being a software developer myself, knowing all the efforts it takes.
Is Office even necessary anymore? Where I work, most people are using LibreOffice or Google Docs and not a single complaint about document exchange or document formats. There's a few Office holdouts, but even they haven't had an issue exchanging documents with the rest of us. Even I behave like a normal human being and use LibreOffice instead of Emacs when I wanna play nice at work.
What exactly is the killer feature of Office to people not obsessed with Outlook? Mac doesn't even have that, having to settle for EntouRAGE. (EDIT: My mistake, not used Mac Office in a long while -- Outlook now exists!)
Can't speak for OP but for many people, yes, it is. My sister works in arts admin. Dealings with funders are done using Word files with macros and protected areas. Works ok on Mac Word (they use Apple at work) but not with Open/LibreOffice.
When I set up an old thinkpad for my sister to use at home, I suggested Ubuntu and got an earful. So an OEM copy of Windows 7 and she got a licensed Office 2010 under her employer's licence agreement.
Also William Gibson...
"Word is, I'm told, horrid, but it talks to publishers, which is really all I use it for."
Outlook on Mac certainly exists - and is much, much better than the thoroughly aneurysm-inducing Entourage.
But yeah, at my last two jobs we've exclusively used Google Docs, and it's been a dream. No more hunting your inbox for a (probably outdated) copy of the Office doc. Sharing is a dream.
It's not quite as usable as a native app. I would be rather happy if there were a native client to GDocs, but as it stands, the ability to collaborate, share, and disseminate far, far trumps whatever usability gaps between it and Office.
There isn't really a substitute for Excel if you want to use big spreadsheets (more than, say, a few hundred rows and a few dozen columns). Neither LibreOffice nor MS Office is really good for hard-core curve fitting, but Excel has a few options that LibreOffice lacks (at least nth-degree polynomial fits and maybe some others). Even when you can use LibreOffice for your spreadsheets, it's often significantly slower.
LibreOffice works just find for my word-processing needs.
Edit: Forgot about Gnumeric for a moment. It's probably twice as good as LibreOffice for what I need, but doesn't do 100% of what Excel does.
I still keep a print-out of a requirements document on my desk that our windows-running QA person printed for me, because there is nothing else in our office that'll display it properly. Office for Mac, Google Docs, LibreOffice, etc - all display revision garbage mixed in with content, outdated text, etc.
I could ask the client to re-send the document without tracking information, or converted to a PDF, but due to their various chain o' command issues, it would probably take a week.
So yes, Office is still necessary, at least in our case.
I recently did an on campus interview with Microsoft. Before the interview, they sent me an application to fill out with my basic information, interests, etc. The application looked like absolute garbage if you opened it with Wordpad, Libreoffice, or Google Docs. I ended up downloading a trial version of Office just to fill out the application.
So the only reason I've ever had in the past few years to use Office is that other people still use it, and Google Docs and LibreOffice are not perfectly compatible 100% of the time.
> most people are using LibreOffice or Google Docs and not a single complaint about document exchange or document formats
I had to edit a presentation urgently. It was nothing exotic, made with PowerPoint. LibreOffice failed to open half the images, as did Keynote (which I bought just for this purpose, because it was an emergency). I can't tell you what happened, just that the one time I needed LibreOffice (or similar) to work, it didn't.
As for Office generally, I still haven't found a good substitute for Excel (sadly).
If you are sending documents back and forth with clients then I still think word is better. The fully integrated review mode is nice showing the history, not versions of the documents.
Also, the only time I really focus on non-code for hours at a time is when I am flying and thats when its nice to be able to work on a) production descriptions b) sales decks and c) job posts or other docs, all of which are better in the Office application.
At least they only made a bad job of trying to take his money. Commonly when I want to stream a movie rental, the studios have seen to it that there is absolutely no way I can legitimately pay for that service.
I am annoyed and frustrated by so,e software therefor it's okay for me to not pay for it? Give me a break. This is such a lame justification for piracy. If the author truly wants to pay for it then he will. Saying you want to pay for it in an attempt to seem on the up and up and really wanting to pay for something are different. I can understand the frustration and I can empathize and I can get on board with the idea that the process they put you through to buy Office is ridiculous but I can't buy the justification for piracy. Just because you sell software yourself for a living doesmt put you in a position to decide when it's okay to pirate software. The author may consider the way in which he sells his software to be superior and therefore it's not okay to pirate what he sells but when it comes to someone else's well that's a different story. But its a slippery slope. Microsoft's process certainly is ludicrous but it's not long before people start saying "you want me to enter an email address to buy software? Oh, that's too much, I think I'll just pirate it, thanks".
Calling it one's and zeros doesn't justify it either. I hate the ones and zeros argument. You're not paying for one's and zeros. You're paying for the value the software creates for you. It may only need to be coded and compiled once but does that mean that after the first person gets value from it that the software has been paid for? Of course not.
If someone creates software and you value what it can do then you are obligated to pay for it if that's what the creator asks. Argue about the definition of stealing till your blue in the face but it doesn't change the fact that you are depriving the author of revenue they would otherwise have gotten. It is stealing and to say otherwise is to do some impressive mental gymnastics.
The system may suck but piracy isn't going to solve the problem. It's just going to create more problems. Using Office without a license doesn't hurt Microsoft. What hurts them is a more popular alternative. The only thing that will change what the author complains about is someone else creating some half decent office replacement in a way that shows Microsoft how to do it right. If such a program existed and were widely adopted you'd better believe they'd take notice and shape up. Piracy hurts people. It doesn't hurt the big guys though and we know it so we all tend to justify it. But that same attitude that gets people thinking its okay to pirate Office allows people to justify pirating software from smaller companies and that's who it hurts.
How about when you pay USD$10,000 for a niche software package with a crappy USB hardware dongle with drivers that only work on Windows XP, despite the application itself working just fine under Windows 7 64-bit?
When I asked the vendor, I was told I could pay another $10,000 so I could buy a new version of the software that just so happened to have a newer DRM dongle.
At that point you really have four options:
1.) Hope someone else pirated it.
2.) Kill a few evenings cracking the application with IDA Pro.
3.) Forever remain on Windows XP on a graphics workstation, unable to use the entirety of RAM installed, or some horrible dual-boot situation isolating you from the rest of your tools.
4.) Pay ANOTHER $10,000.
Seriously, you have no position to tell anyone that there's 'no justification'. It's obvious you're missing real world experience here. I picked #2, myself, but I'd have rather saved time and picked #1 if it had already been done.
I have the real world experience and I stand by my position. It does suck and I can empathize and of course I can understand why you'd pirate the software but are you really going to try to tell me that it's not wrong? Can you honestly say that not paying is okay because the price is too high and you don't agree with the reasons why you can't run your dongle on a new OS? That's what it comes down to in the end. It's about not wanting to pay and disagreeing with the price. The fact that you know the dongle should work on your machine doesn't put you in a position to know why they want you to upgrade. Anyone in that situation would have a knee-jerk reaction and jump to thinking its a corporate conspiracy and they're just gouging people. That's plausible. Or maybe there's a legit reason that you don't know. But in either case, no matter how ridiculous the experience is (and I grant you that the example you provide is very unreasonable) it still doesn't change the fact that someone created something of value to you, you want to use it above all alternatives, and you choose to pirate it which is wrong.
Suppose I go to the Apple store and I want a new MacBook Air. I have to wait in line for an hour. Then when I get into the store they've upped the price by $10k. Then, even after swallowing my frustration, I look to pay but all the checkout guys are busy. So I decide this is fucked up and just walk out with it. You'd agree that was a messed up situation but it's not okay for me to walk out of a store without paying.
The point is something I can't fathom anyone disagreeing with. There's a product. It has a price. If you want it you have to buy it. If you take it without paying that is wrong. How can you disagree with that?
Yes, I can clearly and with good conscious say that it is 100% a-ok to break the lock or take a cracked copy of software you already paid $10,000 for to operate with a $180,000 system if the vendor is going to gouge you over a trivial issue.
I'm really sorry that you live in a fantasy world sponsored by the MPAA and RIAA. I've already paid my pound of flesh to get my work done, intentionally not backporting a dongle driver to force upgrades at $10k a whack is the stuff slime is made of. They do this because they know very well there are not many/any alternative vendors for this equipment, which happens to be an exotic motion capture rig absolutely critical to my work. Fuck that and fuck anyone who tells me I have to grin and bear it or otherwise just wave my hands and go without all because otherwise I might offend their sensibilities over how I might see their software. Personally, I don't care about your software. It hasn't done anything slimy to me yet. You're safe.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood part of what you said. I'm actually cool with people cracking software they've already paid for. That's fine. To me that's like modifying your car in ways that stop it from being street legal. You should be free to do so but at the same time I won't feel bad for you if you were ever stopped for speeding. Now that I understand your example better I don't think you're comparing equivalent things. It's one thing to just take something because you don't like the price and it's another thing to break contract and modify something you've already paid for. Both are still wrong but I can see the justification for the latter.
you think cracking his own copy of the software, which he purchased, so that it will run on windows 7, is somehow less ethical than paying the publisher another $10k for the same software that they have unlocked for window 7?
edit: here's a thought experiment. supposing he managed to build some sort of passthrough sandbox that simply intercepted one or two system calls and made the application think it was running under window xp when it was actually running under windows 7. would you find that unethical too?
Your analogy is incorrect. Making a copy/breaking DRM is not the same as stealing. Stealing deprives the original owner of a physical good, making a copy does not. That's why I wouldn't agree with you walking out of a store with a physical product.
No. The copy argument is bunk. It's not about depriving someone of product, it's about depriving someone payment. In the case of software there is unlimited supply but there isn't an unlimited amount of consumers. Each consumer who circumvents the payment process deprives the creator of the payment they ask of their work. So now you'll argue that they wouldn't have paid anyway but that's also a terrible argument. The original post shows that some people would pay but won't because it's too "inconvenient" to. Furthermore, even if they wouldn't have paid anyway they should have, it's still wrong that they have and use the software and they still deprived the creator of payment. You wouldn't say a shoplifter isn't hurting anyone because they wouldn't have paid anyway, would you? To all these argument I would say they're just clever mental gymnastics made up by people who want to justify piracy.
You are the one doing mental gymnastics. I never said it was right to make a copy, I said it was not stealing. I am sorry that you want so badly for them to be the same, but they are in fact legally different for very good reason.
I would not say the shoplifter is hurting anyone since shoplifting is distinctly different from copyright infringement. He would be depriving someone of their property. Copying something does not deprive the IP owner of their copy.
I'm not trying to justify any immoral act, I trying to prevent justification of absurd laws that infringe on people's basic freedoms (SOPA et al) by stopping people from using hyperbolic statements.
There is no justification short of "needed to save someone's life" for stealing. Your piracy hurts the "good" vendors in the same vertical because they aren't getting funded.
If you paid for it, defeating the dongle isn't something I think of as stealing. If you pay, go for it. I read it as getting the new version for free, that is a different kettle of fish.
Nice rant, but I think you missed his point. He wanted to buy the software, tried to buy the software, but ended up getting this: "We’re sorry. The site you are attempting to access is restricted in your region."
No, I got that. But I just take offense that this is an excuse to pirate something. They do sell copies in stores still and, especially for someone so technically inclined, it'd be pretty trivial to get to the right site. That said, it's still super messed up that they're preventing a guy who wants to buy something from actually buying it but the whole thing came off to me as "edge cases like this is why piracy is okay".
In fairness to the author, I don't think he was seriously advocating piracy, but was more just trying to use it to demonstrate his frustration at trying to pay for a product and not being able to.
I disagree. I think the blog post perfectly shows one of the common rationalizations when pirating software.
I'd even say more -- regardless of the intention of the post, it actually pictures how people act when they are angry / frustrate. We, humans, need to tell ourselves something nice when we do bad things. In this case, it's something like "they were bad to me, so it's OK if I'm bad to them".
I can imagine more sinister reasons for piracy or misconduct of any other kind. This one feels so natural.
I don't think I justified it. I just pointed out that I can see why it happens. Overwhelmingly the post was about wanting to pay for it but being totally frustrated at not being able to, and I was also quite clear that I wouldn't pirate it because of what I believe in.
You live in America don't you? Outside of it things are not all that rosy, as author points out. Sometimes it's plain impossible to buy something, so the options are either not use it (or not listen to it or not watch it) or pirate it. I would pirate it.
Another option that I found is that software is somehow worse in the place where I live. A good example is games with awful polish dubbing or an invasive DRM. I actually ended up few times buying a game, just not to use it and download a pirated version anyway.
The original author uses Office on Windows at work. My employer has a licensing scheme that means purchasing a licence for my own use at home is very cheap (something like £10 for Office 2010).
I'm thinking could the oa use something like crossover office
I'll ask and see if we have a scheme like that at work. I don't own a license of Office for Windows that I can use in a VM or with Crossover, but I'd be willing to entertain that if the price was right.
I can completely sympathise with your experience! I tried buying window 7 a while ago, as a digital download, from Canada. Guess what? The on-line store wouldn't sell to Canadians? We're on the same frigging continent, it's the internet! WTF?! Frankly I don't even know why they are still in business. The whole thing is run by monkeys. I ended up purchasing a licence, and then pirating the actual software, thus I can say that I paid for it, and frankly pirating MS software is SUPERIOR EXPERIENCE compares to purchasing it.
Monkeys.
In the grand scheme of things, it's better for Microsoft that you pirate Office than use something else - so really you are not punishing them for their mistake by doing that.
Your continued use of Office, will mean people can continue sending Office documents and you can send them too, if you used something else that whole system gets disrupted and people you work with consider new tools too. If you share your doc with Google docs for example, their copy of Office for that task is useless and after a while everyone might be using it, in my view it's a much better workflow than email documents around.
Just my 2 cents [I don't think anyone should pirate software by the way].
Why do these companies think it's a good idea to refuse to sell to a customer depending on where they live?
I can understand in the case of Netflix etc where they legally cannot provide access outside of the areas where they have the licences, but there is no such issue here - Microsoft is fully able to distribute their own product, and there isn't even a shipping issue since it's just online.
Even Google has this problem, where they won't ship their devices from the play store to anywhere outside of a few countries, even though they would be fully able to.
A) People in different regions will pay different amounts of money. By restricting regions in which a person can use a thing (such as DVDs) they can sell at the price each market will bear.
B) Sometimes, the separate regions are managed by separate corporations (wholly owned by the parent) which have their own pricing policy.
C) Often there are local laws or agreements dictating that the corporation not undercut local distributors.
I have a saying I like to think I coined, "Don't make it hard for your customers to give you money". I think that applies here.
When you are working to optimize your business, take a step back. If you're focused on adding new features or exploring some marketing campaign, consider how you can optimize the most important part instead: getting paid.
There have been more times than I can remember where I would have bought or paid for something if only the retailer hadn't made it so difficult.
If your experience with Office sucks, just don't buy it. There is not justification for pirating. It's a free market, and Microsoft's monopoly is long gone.
I haven't used Office in years and I've done just fine. The few time people send me `docx` documents, I can either open them up with Preview, Pages, or simply not open it. Most of the time, I don't care enough about the contents. When it's a resumé, sending anything other than a PDF or a website is an instant fail.
>When it's a resumé, sending anything other than a PDF or a website is an instant fail.
What sucks is when you make your resume in latex and you apply to a company that only takes word or raw text files. I've actually skipped out on companies because of this.
So? Set up with a VPN that has stateside IPs, or build your own on AWS.
Whether you pirate Mac Office or not though: I've been using it for awhile now and it's pretty lackluster. Most of the programs are stripped down versions. It usually gets the job done, but you'll probably run into a situation at some point where you want to do something that isn't included with Mac Office 2011.
Well it's sort of a half-assed suggestion since I don't like the program. But there are many free VPNs that could solve this problem easily and rolling your own is fun and informative.
Pretty weak blog piece to be honest. Proclaiming that it's somehow a moral duty to steal something is trumped up nihilism at best.
While I appreciate the frustration (and lord knows Microsoft have frustrated me plenty given I spend half my time developing for their platform), no matter how difficult they make it for you to buy, it's never an excuse not to.
In my arrogant opinion, if a company will literally not allow you to give them your money, they shouldn't whine later about how piracy is killing their sales, making angels and puppies cry, etc.
It sounds like the problem is that a sales & marketing email took him to the wrong site.
To pirate the software he'd at the very least need to do a search on Google to find out how. A simple search[1] shows how easy it is. The first result is a warez site called "Official Apple Store - UK" where he can download it immediately with very little effort.
The best way to run MS Office on a Mac? I use VMware and just run Office within Windows. What's funny is that this is actually faster than launching Office for the Mac while showing me what a Windows user is seeing. By the way I'm doing this on an iMac so I'm not using anything too exotic in terms of hardware.
I'm not sure why Microsoft doesn't put it up on the App Store. They will probably get a lot less customer information, but things would be so convenient. Apple will stand to make a cut, but then there are several companies which sell both on the web as well as the App Store - why not do that.
Adobe was hesitant at first too. They brought several smaller apps to the App Store at first, then followed by some big ones.
You could just go to an apple store and buy it. Pretty lazy to pirate something thats pretty cheap to start with. If you dont have 149 bucks, maybe you have bigger problems than word processing?
Microsoft.Office.2011.With.SP1.MAC.OSX-CRBS is what you're looking for.
Also, guide from torrent comments (don't personally know if they work, but many people reported that they did):
- unrar the download and install the .dmg
- download the crack from [Edit: Google "2011fixTL.rar" to find a link to a "www-mediafire.com" site, around the 6th result. Change the "www-" in the URL to "www." to get the MediaFire download link] (this one still worked for me) and unrar it
- now open spotlight and type terminal
- click Terminal to run it
- type "cd /" and hit enter
- type "open /Library/Preferences" and it will open up the correct folder
- drag the files from the crack folder in to this preferences map
- now try open Word and it should ask you for your name, this means the hack worked. If it ask to validate your licence-key it failed.
- click no on all the support questions and keep continueing
- word should now open, same for the other office programs
After reading that I was struck by a couple of things -- one is that it is hard to feel bad for someone complaining about a bad actor in the software space when they work for a bad actor in the hardware space; two is that even if I have a bad opinion of an employer already, I still think it is bad form to post an article like this with your employer's name linked right at the bottom.
Even though he ultimately concludes that he won't pirate it, it is fairly easy for bad internet "journalists" to twist what he said and involve his employer since he names and links right to them at the bottom of his rant-post. Rant-posts where you invoke even the idea that you may break the law are best made on blogs that do not mention your employer.