There is not a free version. There's an evaluation version that doesn't lock out any features, but it's not provided to you for free -- you have to pay to continue using it. If you're just using it as your text editor for free you're abusing the honour system.
Well, there is the letter of the law, and people don't all necessarily agree with it.
I personally believe creators of software (music, games, other immaterial goods) should be compensated and rewarded fairly, and I gladly let them have their fair share.
At the same time, I find it ridiculous to pay for something that can be copied at no cost. The technology allows everything to be free, but we force an emulation of physical goods onto the digital world, so we don't have to change the way or society works. We use the legal system to enforce this.
I haven't found a way to reconcile these two views yet, this is a major unsolved problem in our society. I believe a solution would need a radical change in how our economy works.
But in the meanwhile, I have no moral problem to "pirate" stuff when I can't afford it or think it is to expensive.
Acrobat Pro? Photoshop? As rarely as I need it and as expensive as it is: Free. MS Office: has become to cumbersome to pirate, costs. Sublime Text? I like the product and want the Indy developer to succeed, so costs, too.
> I haven't found a way to reconcile these two views yet
I'm not sure what your difficulty is. There's almost no cost to create a copy, but creating the original has many costs. Since no one is going to pay for creating the original upfront, the developer asks people to pay for the copies, and legal protections ensure that's possible.
Reminds me of an episode of West Wing that discusses the cost of pharaceuticals:
"Why do they charge $100 for a pill that costs $1 to make?"
"Because the first pill cost $100,000,000 to make."
$100 for a single pill (that saves lives) is actually considered quite insane in most healthcare systems in the developed world, and there isn't any fairytale about intellectual property you can spin that would make it palatable. I'm not a US citizen and I realize I'm no one to judge, every country and culture has their own lies, and some are a lot worse.
Just let us pull the wool over our own eyes, please.
Pause for a moment and reflect on the few posts above. It feels really weird to conflate in the same breath the entertainment industry and healthcare. I don't believe it's a given that the same standards should apply to both, but the topic flows like it's just that (and I vaguely remember it being about a text-editor, once ... ;) ).
So, entertainment and some perspective on the status quo; It's been roughly half a century since the entertainment/media/content distribution industry has been growing into a very powerful political lobby, pushing for more stronger enforcement of intellectual property rights in the face of changing information technologies.
Some person who doesn't know any better might think, "Hey wait what, artists holding political power? That sounds like one of those crazy counter-culture TAZ-type pipe dreams, I always wondered what would happen if that would actually come to happen ..." -- except of course it didn't because it's not the artists, it's the middle-men that hold nearly all the power -- I'm not that person btw, nor saying I want artists to rule the world ;) Just painting a silly picture to show what intellectual property rights on the surface seem to do (protecting content-creators) but in addition shifting a disproportionally large amount of power completely elsewhere ("rightsholders", "the content industry", "big media", middle-men, etc).
Now here comes the magic trick. Enforcing IP rights, tightening the laws, going after pirates, DRM, all that stuff the content industry is lobbying for, apart from generic "control", what does it really accomplish? It basically tries to make intellectual property into a fungible good. That's what it does. But you can rule and legislate all you want, that doesn't make it so. All that's happened is that you've ruled and legislated it so that people must act (and pretend) that intellectual property is a fungible good. Carefully worded legislation to change a fundamental aspect of reality, it's the closest thing to a magic spell you'll see.
Imagine the other way around, imagine a "free and open matter lobby" decreeing that bananas should no longer be considered a fungible good and that anyone should be able to copy bananas freely. Carefully worded legislation tip-toes around the insanity of this idea, in a way that makes it illegal to commercially differentiate between an "original banana" and its copies, or that copies of a banana are somehow less nutritious than the supposed "original", regardless of the medium they're copied on--instead the big players in the industry advertise their bananas as being intrinsically "more copyable" than the competition (whose bananas are rumoured to come from a "master copy", which is an atrocious lie, as it is illegal to keep track).
If only we could liberate more fruit, we might solve world hunger and in particular we could feed all the starving artists. Maybe next century!
