[ballard]

Software piracy, no matter where I or anyone stands on it, is part of the economy. It's a forced sale price of zero just as FOSS. The interesting bit is there may be support costs, server costs and other indirect costs associated with pirated software. This hampers a shop's ability to release more versions and keep quality up. (Although it seems like there's always another version of VMware Fusion every time I turn around despite there being barely any investment into its development.)

And also there are interesting situations like DoD and BestBuy. Obviously the profit motive prevails after they've paid their fines and cut POs for maintenance agreements on X thousand seats.

Hypothetically, it would make financial sense for some high value products with a small market to intentionally "leak" to warez groups. It's easier to discover and monetize such obligated customers than fight year long sales cycles and/or pilot deployments.