I find it ironic (somewhat in the vein of Alanis) that a company built to derive their income from the sales of software actively combats the idea that other companies deserve to do exactly that.
This just lost all semantic meaning for me, but it's worth it.
YOU'RE SELLING SOFTWARE! How is it hard to understand that you need to honor your own business model in order to be ethical? If you expect people to pay for your software, why not do others the same favour?
To be totally honest, if you think it's OK for you to pirate software because you "deserve" or "need" it, why won't you think it's OK to pay your staff less then they might deserve? What about your customers who "need" your software but can't pay for it?
Don't shit on your own business model and expect to come off clean.
Yeah, I left there pretty quickly. (The owner was an incredibly unethical person.)