That costs WHAT?!

[LostMyMind]

Actually, the hardlock are quite easy to overcome.... Got to love window's message hook system. However those pirated version usually have a crack that skips the part in the code that checks for the hardlock. Which is why personally I think that level of copy protection only annoy the legit customers.

My mother's extremely expensive sewing software has those annoying hardlock (one for each type). And it annoys the crap out of her too, since she does some of the work on her desktop, other times she uses my laptop. And she has to carry that hardlock around to use the software that worthless unless you have the extremely expensive sewing machine that uses the data from the software.

[Arm]

Yeah, you would think these professional graphics suite developers would get wise and learn the "less it cost the more you sell" economic lesson.

Back in the day, only a very, very, very few people would ever use an 3D graphic suite software. But now days, it's so common. And if they don't wise up, they're going to lose out to the open source market very soon.

Yep.

Especially because piracy is a fact of life, unfortunately. But you have to realize, they're sacrificing the individual customers for the big score- the corporations. Larger corporations can't afford to get sued for using a bootleg, so they have to shell out.

It may seem ass-backwards, because if the corporations ever CAN find something cheaper, they WILL use it... but, for now, the software companies are still making their way on that tactic. Because of brand loyalty. People who use Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator (and they ARE one of the cheaper suites...) in my experience find most of the open source tools to be insufficient or unwieldy or simply not user-friendly. It doesn't matter if the tool is actually capable of handling the task if the users don't like it.

I doubt we'll see a real shift for another ten years or more. It'll take a while for a decent free/cheap suite to come along, and a new generation of users to grow up. Once there are professionals used to using someone else's software, that's what they'll stick with.

[otakuneko]

If the kid (or anyone else for that matter) just wants to play around with making 3d objects, I'd recommend DOGA-L3. It's free, very basic, and you wouldn't want to use any models you make in a game or anything, but it's fairly easy to use once you grasp a few concepts. It's fun to play with too. I got introduced to it by players of Space Empires 4, many of whom used it to make shipsets (SE4 being a 2D game, the models were only used to render static 2D portraits, so the humongous poly count didn't matter).

http://www.doga.co.jp/english/software/index.html

(well, ok, it's shareware. You can only build static scenes and models with the shareware version, no animations.)