> or most commonly: pirated it.

Yes, I'm aware. That's the problem elucidated in the article. Developers expect everything for free, even though the price of tools relative to what they get paid to deliver products using those tools is completely trivial. This reluctance to pay for anything harms developers themselves most of all. If developers normalized a culture of paying for things they use, more developers would be able to develop their own independent software and sustain themselves without being beholden to $awful_corp_environment to pay the bills. But because developers will do anything they can to avoid paying <1 hr salary for a tool that saves them many hours, there is a huge gap between corporate professionals, who make lots of money, and open-source developers, most of whom make almost nothing, with only a relatively limited subset of independent developers able to bridge the gap and make a living producing good, non-corporate-nightmare software.

I'm pretty pro-piracy for students and such. It is an extremely good thing for learning to be as available as possible, even to those in poverty, so that they can make something better of their situation and contribute more to society than if they were locked in to low-knowledge careers solely by virtue of the random chance of their upbringing. But people who make a living off software development never graduate from the mindset of piracy. Even for open-source software, the vast majority of users never contribute to funding those projects they rely on. If we think open-source software is good for the world, why are we so opposed to anyone being able to make a living creating it? The world's corporate capture by non-free software is a direct result of our own collective actions in refusing to pay anything for anything even when we can afford to.

Well, I've been programming since 1986 and I had to buy all the compilers I used. For the Mac: Lightspeed Pascal, Lightspeed C and Metrowerks. I wish I had the money to buy MPW. Linux then was just a glint in Linus's eyes. We didn't have the internet with easy access to pirated software. I didn't do BB's so I don't know about that area. Once I went to uni in the 90's I started using Usenet but even then I didn't download any pirated software. Microsoft was virtually giving away Visual Studio/Visual Basic to University students. Back then I also remember reading Linus' arguments with Tanenbaum over microkernels and this funny language called Python and its creator unveiling/supporting it on Usenet. Around that time more and more tools were being offered for free and as a poor student I was delighted. Also we got access to free Unix tools since as we were doing work on Unix systems. Oh yeah, I remembered using this cool functional language called Miranda in one of my courses but was sad that it was a paid product. And then I heard about the debut of Haskell which was sort of a free answer to Miranda.

Turbo Pascal was not freeware when it was new.

Back in ye olden days, prior to teh interwebs, compilers were not free and it was an assumed price of entry to programming. Pirating has always been a thing, but I've paid for more than one compiler in my life and I wasn't exactly flush with cash.

As heavy Borland user I am quite sure none of their software was freeware.

Yes they had educational discounts, but that was it.

While many hobbyists developer market, like the hobbyist graphic design market, pirated their tools, the corporate market did paid for their tools.

The issue here is that they the developers aren't convincing their companies to pay for libraries now, partly because a lot of the tools are now free.

Equipment for any real life hobby costs money, and people are willing to pay for good equipment. Why is software so different? FOSS has made us so resistant to paying for good software. I'm not saying software has to be expensive, even $20 per major version could make a burgeoning indie industry thrive.