Software Piracy: Fighting Back

The Unsanity blog recently featured an entry on a shareware author that took a slightly more aggressive stance on software piracy.

Slightly might be the wrong adverb for this case as the mechanism employed had the ability to wipe out the offending user’s entire home directory. The author reportedly decided this was too harsh and removed the code a few hours later.

Why do I bring this up? Well, Unsanity wanted to keep quiet what the product and who the author was, but Slashdot ran a story today revealing the identity. The cat is out of the bag, as they say.

Personally, I don’t have any sympathy for any of the “victims” of this code. It’s a controversial topic to be sure. I personally felt my blood boil over while reading some threads at Mac Serial Junkie. The audacity of the software pirates blew my mind. The “people” (or ghouls as I like to think of them) over there spend the majority of their time at a site dedicated to software piracy, leeching off the efforts of software developers. They then speak with what they believe to be righteous indignation about the topic, getting upset at the idea of software developers fighting back. It’s preposterous.