If you are not familiar with the story, you can read more about it here. It’s a first on the internet.
Why I think this is both good and bad? First, it’s a trend that once started, will continue. We can assume that soon, most of the popular file sharing websites will be gone, be it illegal or legal sharing. So I would like to speak about that – a world where the software is only available if you buy it, no matter who is in need of it.
This will be an amazing thing for companies who build digital products, such as ourselves, because people will need to get your products from your website, and there will be no chance to get them anywhere else. This is good. More money for agencies.
But there is a lot of bad as well. To start with, imagine young students / kinds, wanting to try out software, or to learn how to use it. Mosts of them would not have the necessary funds to purchase software priced in the order of thousands of dollars. So they would actually go through the troubles of finding and getting the files they need, in a way or another.
I can envision that getting web projects completed in the future will be very expensive, and the reason is that there won’t be many individuals and agencies able to purchase the needed software otherwise.
I am sure there are a lot of good developers/agencies in poor countries, that do not pay to get their CS suite, or whatever, because they cannot. At the same time, a lot of people from richer countries, let’s say US, hire those devs / studios / etc, for prices that will keep them unable to pay for such software, hence getting their projects completed cheap. There won’t be many of these studios in the future, so everybody will have to hire and pay for people at rates such as in the US. Those will be fun times, world changing I would add.
Finally, you won’t see so much innovation online as you do today, because people won’t have money to invest in getting their web projects/ideas built.
So let’s see what this turns out into. I’m not against it, but I don’t support it either. I think people will always find a way to get software, when there is no other easier, affordable way. Why can’t we work on that instead?