On Saturday, 17 March 2018 at 09:31:58 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
I don't know about compilers specifically, but the big
distributors in Europe charged some hefty margins on their
imports. So pricing in US was often much lower than here...
When I think of it, the distributors probably only cared about
corporate customers for software development (and my impression
is that distributors often didn't know much about computers and
software anyway). Since distributors didn't know better they
hired young computer enthusiasts to work for them, which cracked
the software protections and spread it among their friends before
the software hit the stores...
So European computer enthusiasts had easy access to bootleg
copies of common software. Copying was rampant for cultural
reasons, which included common fair use clauses that allowed
copying between individuals and friends. By rampant, I mean
people copied >90% of the software they used.
I knew of more people that bought "alternative dev tooling" (at
reasonable pricing) than the offerings from big players (which
often would cost more than the computer hardware, and as a
recurring cost...). There was also an attitude that "if the price
is unreasonable high then it is perfectly reasonable and moral to
distribute bootleg copies of it".
