I write software for a living, and you better believe that it takes a ton of effort, time, and money to do. So yea, I want to be compensated for what I do. So if you pirate my software, you are stealing from me, just like if I had made a car or bike to sell and you stole that.

And you may think 'but you can sell it to hundreds of others' but guess what Most software you see takes 6+ months or more to make by several people. It's not something that gets whipped off the factory line.

Which means that if you add up the salaries for the developers, the artists, the project managers, most major software you see costs MILLIONS to make. So if Wolfram sells each license for $700 or even $1000 and it cost them $15 million (not out of the question at all) to make that means they have to sell between 15 and 21 thousand licenses before they break even, let alone make a profit

And that's for 1.0 that doesn't include paying for the developers who will be kept on for months or years to maintain and update and fix any issues in that software.

Oh, and for all those wondering China is party to the Berne Convention which means that cracking software copywrited in any other country party to it, is Illegal. @AndrejaKo, @BaardKopperud, @rumtscho