You were the one who quoted that wage theft is a form or fraud, so I’m not sure what’s your point. Yes, some theft can be fraud… but still theft.

Stealing services doesn’t necessarily have to do with copyright infringement.

My point is that OP over simplification of theft is not even worth considering, from a legal or personal point of view.

So salary theft by employers is not really theft. Got it.

The point is to make money, do they charge extra to increase the data cap? If so, it’s all about money.

Yeah, but that piece of software didn’t came up to existence out of nowhere. Someone invested time, or paid for infrastructure to complete it. When you steal electricity, most of the cost is because of the infrastructure you used, which you will never own anyway.

I agree information should be free, as long as the generator of that information agrees with it.

Saying that, I still pirate things, not because I think I’m entitled to do it, that’s a very poor excuse.

In South America too. Professorors provide PDFs and in my time even photocopies of the relevant chapters.

I’m guessing he means in engineering (excluding computational). I’m a chemical engineer, and yes, MATLAB is everywhere, only few know about Octave, and python is used mostly for personal projects, I’ve never seen it in an industrial environment, apart maybe web base user interfaces, but don’t get me started with LabVIEW.

I hear that everywhere in here, but it doesn’t make any sense. Do you own the electricity network? Do you own the maid that clean your house? Do you own the room in the hotel? Is it justified not to pay for those services?

Only until very recently LibreOffice is almost on par with Microsoft Office. 10 years ago OpenOffice was horrible, I tried my best to use it but unless you were using it only to write letters to your city hall, it was unusable.

I wish that was the only thing. I work in science/engineering and lots of software that control equipment are only windows.

There are options like using virtual machines, but it’s way to cumbersome and prone to errors, you don’t want a measurement that took half a day get ruined because of a stupid communication error.