Why I unashamedly pirate software

I am an unrepentant and unashamed pirate – software, music, movies, I don’t really care.

 

With movies and music it’s a combination of resenting the ridiculous prices the media distribution companies of the world think they can still charge, plus the fact that quite frankly – I can.

 

With software, it’s a little of both of those reasons, plus one overriding one – software is buggy crap, and I resent paying to be what’s essentially a beta crash test dummy.  Case in point:

 

For the last week Symantec AV Corp has been pissing me off.  It constantly complains about needing to be updated, but won’t run the update engine.  If I run the update engine manually, it says there are no updates… but the error won’t clear, and since it’s wired into the Windows notification centre, I’m pissed off with the popup warnings.

 

Uninstall the app, and of course it now won’t reinstall – obsolete and no longer supported.  Go find a current version, now called Symantec Endpoint.

 

This promptly pisses me right off to by taking over the Windows Firewall and forcing me to learn a bullshit obscure interface to set the thing the way I want it.  I dealt with that, right up until it pulled PRECISELY THE SAME broken update engine bullshit as AV Corp did.  Right, I’ve had this – Symantec Corp used to be OK, but apparently it’s now going the same way as their Norton rubbish.  Rip Endpoint out and OH FUCKING JOY, it kills the TCP stack in the process of getting its tentacles out of the OS.

 

I’m now running the free version of M$ Essentials, which is pissing me off a LOT less.

 

What gets me though is that the software companies of the world expect you to pay for this rubbish.  Sorry, but for premium prices I expect something that works – which most software sadly does not.  I’m running M$’s premium OS here at the moment and I can’t always right-click in an Explorer window without crashing the shell – apparently that’s a “known bug”.

 

Frankly, paying money for software is something that mugs do.