My ex is Bulgarian. She makes over €150k+, and she outright refuses to buy any software, even an app for €0,99.
Also, she's rather wait for ads instead of pay the €0,99.
Other kids in Bulgaria literally made fun of me for buying WoW with summer job money, even though it was the one popular game that was complete crap pirated. Even every single office I've seen there before had pirated Windows and everything else.
I think an issue here is that in lower-income countries software without regional pricing is considerably more of an expense. Something like Office or Photoshop is also quite different than a videogame imho, those are skills that are valuable (or often expected) on the labour market.
Well ... depending on the usecase it _is_ a waste of money. Libreoffice, Gimp and Inkscape are perfectly viable alternatives to MS and Adobe products if you are a casual user.
That said, I don't believe anybody who has used the 'real' office/photoshop/etc is easily able to go back to a 'lesser' alternative, but that's mostly due to sunken cost and lock in ... but, I don't think a casual user will make good use of the better features in the better software.
I think those are good arguments for allowing teenagers to pirate software. If you learn how to use photoshop then you’re unlikely to relearn GIMP. And companies are less likely to pirate software. (Though I have heard of some small ones that do)
>If you learn how to use photoshop then you’re unlikely to relearn GIMP.
We currently see something related to this in the Pharmaceutical industry. There are a lot of statisticians/programmers that learn R or python in university, while most large-pharma companies are using SAS. There is a movement within the industry to pivot or try to pivot to R due to the scarcity of SAS programmers or/and the cost of teaching new employees a new programming language.
If SAS would have more accessible trainings/certifications I am sure R would never even be considered.
So, similar mentality. I ended up buying all her software (Office, photoshop etc;) but she said it was a waste of money.