I pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the

I pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the development software I used to learn C, assembly language, etc. This is back on the C64/Amiga 500, before free software was a thing for at home use (the gnu project existed, but I was doing this well before Linux existed). The software was often being sold for multiples of the cost of the (scrounged-together) hardware I'd be running it on. It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster. I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.