Reasons to buy legal software (and to not use illegal software):
- Fully featured, relatively bug-free, available
- Free, downloadable patches to correct the very few bugs and security vulnerabilities that do occur once in a blue moon
- Free or low-cost upgrades
- Peer pressure from other professionals who have invested money in legal software and think that means everyone should
- Not to have to fib to clients asking whether your software was legal (does this ever actually happen?) or to have to perjure yourself signing a contract clause declaring that you use only legal software
- Those nice young people at tech support are a pleasure to deal with, available 24/7, and will come round to your house and massage your temples when you have a headache
- You think Adobe (or whichever corporate giant) does a great job and deserves a return on its investment
- You can save money by pretending to be a student / teacher, even more by buying a second-hand ‘education’ version. You think there is nothing iffy about this, everyone does it
- You have a vague idea Big Brother could find out if you use illegal things
- Cracked software breaks, only occasionally but always at the worst time
- p2p and other means of acquiring illegal software can leave you open to malware
- You think stealing is stealing (i.e., you don’t distinguish between illegal and immoral)

Reasons to use illegal software (and not buy legal software):
- Cheap or free
- To keep your hand in at p2p, setting up proxies, cracking and other fun things
- This is the real world. Even the most intellectual-property-rights-sensitive professionals ‘borrow’ and ‘lend’ each other things like fonts, and without paying more than lipservice to any “I’ll delete it from my machine for as long as you’re using it on yours” nonsense
- Once they have purchased (a) software licence(s), most small businesses and even public institutions like ministeries that you know wouldn’t think twice about installing further, licence-less copies of that software. And your duty to your family or bank manager is to compete as well as you can with aforesaid small businesses
- Not to have to deal with tech support slimeballs
- Software giants want to reduce people to helpless droids incapable of using alternatives (hence the ‘education’ versions), and are, in fact, hellbent on galactic domination
- Legal software isn’t really worth all that money, it’s just dressed up to justify the abusive prices
- You aren’t scared of Big Brother
- ‘Stealing’ means ‘taking away.’ You can’t take something away and leave it in the same place for others to use. Ergo…
- Oh come on, what’s the difference between pretending to be someone you aren’t (such as a student) and straightforward piracy?
- Public libraries never used to pay royalties when you were a lad and that was not just OK, it was a good thing. Just because they changed their minds doesn’t mean you have to. In fact, the whole copyright industry / sector and its pressure groups and lobbies get right up your nose
- Oh, all right, perhaps it’s naughty of you, but the truth is you don’t really give a damn

Comments are welcome.

In fact, I don’t think a National Freelancers Day is an entirely ridiculous idea. Not that I think freelancers deserve any more tribute than factory workers or post-office clerks, but because freelancing nowadays is much more important in terms of the economy as a whole than it used to be (or at least it seems that way to me, I don’t have statistics to back me up). And if I am right, I think it reasonable that, on the one hand, people should be made aware of this sociological shift, and on the other, that freelancers should be given institutional and government support.

I do think ‘Freelancers Day’ should have been written with an apostrophe at the end of the first word, though. It should be placed after the ’s, there being no ambiguity as in Mother’s/Mothers’ Day (is it a homage to your mother in particular, or mothers as a whole?). So I find it a little ironic that the authorities in question did not employ a competent freelance copywriter to name the day.