It's a pity, that some developers trend to ignore groups of people, that cannot afford a legal copy of their software. No, I'm not talking about ones, spending tens of bucks a day for beer, but not willing to pay the same money for an app they like. In some contries, like Russia, where the salary of an average person is rarely more, than $100 a month (that's hardly a survival minimum) and people often buy computers for no more, than $500 (including monitor), the problem of software piracy is quite a critical.

So, what should a person do if he (she) wants to get a program, but cannot pay for it? Let's take skinnable software as a sample.

• Look for the free alternatives. At present time there are lots of interesting freeware tools at www.skinnable.org. Some of them are crappy, others are OK... Digging a little you may find, that there are lots of interesting applications, which may be slightly harder in use, than their commercial "brothers", but do their work well. Among the most popular free skinnable applications I could name XMPlay Rainlendar and Rainmeter, Winamp 5, Litestep and many others.
• Pirate a software: that's simple. Go to one of available warez archives and download whatever you need (don't ask me for URLs, I won't share ). In many countries it would have no "bad" consequences if only you won't feel yourself guilty for stealing something.
• Give up. That's not the thing we're going to do, right?
• Use legal, but crippled version of a software. Some companies give away outdated or feature limited versions of their applications free of charge. They still work, and if you don't mind against constant reminders, asking you to get the full versions, you may use them as long as you wish.
• Get commercial software for free. Interested? In fact some companies can give you registration keys to their programs for doing some work. For example, Lighttek (the creators of Talisman Desktop) and Gladiators Software (these guys made Aston) share free registrations to talented theme creators and people, supporting their products; And they're not alone. My personal experience shows, that many companies are glad to give you the key in return for doing something useful for them: polishing documentation, translations, designing themes and skins, writing articles in magazines, reporting bugs ans so on.

So what can you do if you don't have money to buy a favorite product? The easiest legal way is using free altrnatives: this requires no efforts from your side. The harder approach implies getting a program in return of doing some job. Talking for myself, I have quite a large set of applications, "bought" this way. Free software is good. Getting money for one's work is no way worse. So, paying with your brain/hands instead of your money is quite a honest approach, don't you think?