I think that there is a confusion here: making mistakes is not a necessity for success. Making mistakes is necessary for learning, but not for success. Any lottery winner can confirm that.
It is all down to this philosophy that says that success comes from hard work and recovering from failure, and that if you try hard enough you eventually reach your goals. But you also need sheer luck.
And please, don't translate luck as "being at the right place at the right time" because that amounts to trying hard enough, but is not. You can be at the right place at the right time because of... sheer luck.
I read the original post and the discussion with interest. The conclusion seems to be that there are lots of alternatives to pirating, and most, if not all, of the posters agree that it is at least unethical to use pirated software.
However, there is an idea that still makes me feel uncomfortable. Competitive advantage was mentioned as a factor in the choice, but do you really think that the rest of the world shares your mindset with you?
As an example, take the eLance, vWorker, etc coders for hire . Giving the amount of labor that is being sourced there. Piracy is rampant on developing countries, and you're really competing not only in quality or hourly rates, but also on the amount of investment required to have the necessary tools.
Ironically, all this work is outsourced from companies that likely respect licensing conditions religiously.
The problem has no easy solution. Either pirate in the same level as them or make them pay as you do. The second solution seems to me unrealistic in a short to medium time frame.
This is not an argument in favour of piracy, just an observation on how piracy unbalances the competition.
Personally, I always use free tools. If there is no free tool available for the job, either I pay for it or don't accept the work.
In the past, I accepted a junior student installing an unlicensed copy at home just to learn as something that was not hurting anyone, and even likely to benefit MS/Adobe/Autodesk in the long term. Nowadays, there are "Express" or "Lite" versions of almost everything, including SQL Server and Oracle, and there is little room for such arguments.
Hey, and if you're not sure if your MS Office using customer is going to be able to open your LibreOffice sales proposal, just save it as a PDF.
Please stop the FUD. Merely plugging the phone to the PC CANNOT START ANY KIND OF VIRUS SPREAD UNLESS YOU STILL HAVE THE AUTORUN FEATURE ENABLED. Repeat with me, many many times. Please do.
There is one thing to hear this from an ordinary user. They can also say such things as "it low level reformats the disk" without knowing what a low level format is, or knowing that low level formats are not possible since a long long time. They can also say that they steal your satellite dish card codes, whatever they are.
All of those statements are false and the product of a kind of medieval fear. It's ok to hear that from users. It's not ok to hear that from seasoned professionals. Please.
In the same vein: please, copying infected files DOES NOT INFECT THE COMPUTER THAT DOES THE COPY.
Enough is enough. Virus is an industry that builds on malice (from virus writers) but also fear and plain ingnorance (from antivirus writers).