I was reading a discussion over at Slashdot about a guy who got busted distributing warez and has agreed to a Slashdot interview. I found the discussion and some of the questions fascinating from an ethical perspective, and I'm curious to hear what the AO community thinks about some of the points raised.

Given the field that we're all interested in, I think it's safe to say that most of us have a checkered past of some sort or have done things that didn't fall just exactly on the right side of the law. Kind of like that line from Beverly Hills Cop - "I wasn't always a cop, you know." I probably shouldn't confess to it in a public forum, but I've downloaded the odd shareware serial number or warez release of Photoshop - or whatever - in the past, but I don't these days because I don't touch anything but Linux now, and it's kind of hard to pirate free software.

The thing that really got my attention was this comment:
People like to look down on cracking (of software and computers) as being evil or juvenile once they're a sysadmin/security analyst. While I'm not going to call them wrong, I suspect that a very large number of the more knowledgeable sysadmins, system coders, and whatnot out there, have at one time or another spent some time freeriding, and learned one or two technical skills in a not-so-legitimate manner. I don't think I've talked to a UNIX guy (and I'm talking about serious sorts, not the type churned out with an IS degree and little idea what they're doing) yet who's talked about this and said "No, I've never pirated software/cracked software/broken into someone's server". I spent a lot of time cracking software back in the day. Never distributed it, and it did eat up a lot of time. However, I'm now happily using the skills that started there to do systems work. Poking at people's servers, in the same vein, breeds better security types.
Do you think having a background in warez and cracking makes us better security/admin types as the comment suggests, and if so, does that mean there's a hidden value in the warez trade? More to the point, does the software industry owe a debt to the warez pirates for giving people like us the skills to become white hats? And if so, what's the way out of this catch-22?

In a nutshell..... do you have to be a bad guy first before you can be a good guy?

I'm curious to hear what people think on this......