Software - Cracks and hacks, Why?

A few days back a friend of mine asked me to give him an estimate of how much it would cost to assemble a decent rig that could play most recent games and stuff at least at medium settings. So I was drawing up a list of items he would need, and I included the OS in that list too and I sent him an e-mail. And he was like "Why did you include the OS and office packages in the cost, I can get that off some friend or download it and crack it." Now that's an attitude that prevails over a large majority of our country's population. The concept of buying software is alien to most. Several things influence this:
1. The fact that software costs are quite high.
2. The widespread availability of pirated DVDs and CDs.
3. Downloading stuff off the net carries no penalties in the country unless you do it on a really massive scale.
4. No one ever tells us even in school that we should pay for the software that we use.

Nobody really cares about the time and effort that people put into developing programs.
The lack of awareness is as big a problem as the widespread availability of pirated copies. But, hey lets not put the big software giants on a higher pedestal either. They rob us blind for every piece of software we need. How many times have we looked at the prices of various Windows Vista editions and gone "Wow, that's daylight robbery!". And they don't give you discounts on subsequent editions too, you have to buy it all over again next time it comes out. And that's true of almost every company. The ones who suffer the most from this vicious cycle are indeed the small time and independent software developers who put out shareware versions for download and hope that someone buys stuff from them. They might as well give stuff out free what with Kazaa, Lime wire, the torrent network and every other P2P type network ruling the roost!