Well, if you're gonna make that argument, you might as well also say that if Windows were free Linux would disappear. But I'll bet you aren't going to say that. THAT sounds like a much more factually defensible statement. The more effectively"free" alternatives to actually free software there is, the less penetration the actually free software has.This means that if all piracy was to disappear the number of Linux users would increase by 50%. While that’s an impressive number, the relative impact is modest. In most countries Linux is used by roughly 1% of desktop users, which would increase to 1.5%.
“I find that an increase in the piracy rate by 1% in a country is expected reduce the user share of Linux by around 0.5%. Although there is some level of uncertainty on the exact estimate, the direction is negative with a high level of statistical certainty,” Gramstad explains to TorrentFreak.
Users for whom Linux and Windows are really interchangeable are a minority of Linux users, which he glosses over as "network effects" because he's an economist. Writing software on Windows is an excruciating process you only do if you're deploying desktop applications to Windows users. Webapps became a thing first because you aren't afflicted with your users' software choices, and as much as front end web development sucks, at least you can do it in a comfortable environment. Likewise, with, as far as I know, only one exception, Linux doesn't have any kind of presence in your industry, despite the real-time scheduling work that was done in the 2.6 series to support the high end audio users who don't exist. As you've said, you use a Mac or you use Windows, because that's where your applications live. If the availability of pirate Windows is affecting your choice of platform, you're one of the users who uses a web browser and maybe an office suite and that's pretty much it, and while that's a very large portion of Windows users, it's a vanishingly small portion of Linux users.
Huh. I may have to try that out. I've got Mint running on a VM on the Windoze monster (that's one way to keep the viruses out - browse via Linux!) and as deeply invested as I am in Pro Tools, I'd be willing to try something else if it didn't suck...
Adobe and most of the big graphics software vendors used to all have an unofficial policy of not going after hobbyists pirating their products. They'd sic the BSA on professionals, but hobbyists pirating their products because they couldn't afford to buy them were where the professionals who did came from. I don't think it's a coincidence I started seeing artists from outside the free software community using the Gimp, Inkscape and Blender when that stopped.