@ErikUden @knightly666 @whatshisays I wouldn't even pirate Windows or an Adobe product. 2 decades of using various versions of windows at work was akin to torture, especially the audio workstations, which never had real DAWs on them. There's so much better FOSS out there, anyway. Gimp and Inkscape to replace Adobe's crap, Audacity, Ardour and others to replace ProTools, hell, even the open source OSes are better than the commercials. Only reason I still run Mac OS is Logic Pro X and the longevity of their hardware. I'd be Debian in a heartbeat if I could get reliable, generic hardware. Most of the latter built to a price deliberately speed up its failure.

@ErikUden @knightly666 IBM took this to the next level in the 1990s. They gave out "trial" versions of OS/2 Warp 4 on CD-ROM. The trial version was crippled with the most BS, easy to crack protection imaginable. So much so that many people cracked it and installed the full version *accidentally*. The reason... get OS/2 into as many peoples hands as possible, as IBM made one last push against Windows. Alas, it was not to be, but it shows IBM was ahead of the game in terms of viral tactics (and OS/2 wasn't a bad OS either - "A better DOS than DOS, and a better Windows than Windows" was quite accurate).