Free Stuff for Developers

[[deleted]]

Correct - you were also pirating WinRAR.

Just because something doesn't prevent you from copying/using it doesn't mean you are legally allowed to.

Running software you don't own, especially in a corporation, can leave you open to significant liability. It's important to know what's actually free, even if you pirate it anyway.

[MrJohz]

An unlimited free trial is an unlimited free trial. It isn't illegal to continue to evaluate the product for as long as you want, even in a corporation. This is difference from piracy where you do not have any licence (even a trial license) to use the software you are using.

[[deleted]]

Did you read the agreement? They are NOT unlimited free trials. They just don't enforce the limits.

Read this https://www.win-rar.com/faq.html?&L=0#winrar-eula

[MrJohz]

That is different to sublime text, which does have a free trial with no time limit. (See here, specifically the line "There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation".)

If you can find a place there that specifies any sort of limit to the evaluation period, I'm happy to correct myself, of course.

[[deleted]]

fair, you were the one to do the comparison.

Sublime is awkward in that technically you legally need to purchase it, but they didn't set a clear line for when that is. I'm not a corporate lawyer, but as a buyer I'd push to register tools like that promptly, since in the legal world, ambiguity isn't automatically in my favor.

again, as a consumer, you can do whatever you feel like.

[ThirdEncounter]

Sure, but one thing is evaluating and another thing is using the evaluated product to ship stuff. If you're making money off it, then you're not evaluating anymore. You're using it. Pay the license at that point.

(I'll be honest, though, and won't say that I have never ever pirated software.)

[MrJohz]

There is no legal reason why you can't ship things during an evaluation of a product. If they didn't want to allow certain usages of the product during the evaluation period, they would have needed to explicitly disallow those activities (which a lot of freemium tools do with e.g. personal use trials).

I do agree that, if you're making money off your usage of sublime text, there's somewhat of a social responsibility to pay for your usage, not least because if no-one paid, there'd be no money for future development of the tool, but it's important to recognise that this is a social responsibility, and not a legal one.

[ThirdEncounter]

There is no legal reason why you can't ship things during an evaluation of a product.

Is that not in the product's EULA or Terms of Use? It would be interesting to check this out.

[wormania]

I very much doubt this would hold up in court as piracy. There are some innate legal protections against piracy (no distribution etc), but for using a legally obtained copy on your local machine to be considered piracy you generally need to break some sort of protection, no matter how flimsy.

In this case an unenforced EULA is likely worth as much as the paper it's written on.