TGIF! Totally Getting It Free!

I have an awesome dilemma. It's not awesome in the sense that I enjoy it or that it will be the easiest choice, but it is the first time this decision had to be made for me. I need to choose between using an open source sound editor or using a pirated copy of one that is very not free. In leu of having a computer without Ubuntu studio and wanting to not use UbuStu again because I think there are more powerful linux distributions out there for sound editing. And so instead of picking a new distro I downloaded the next thing that I have used the most, Ableton Live!. When I bought my m-audio firewire solo to record my guitar, it came with a free demo version of Live! and I thoroughly enjoyed using it. It lets me do a lot of things, from create drum beats to adding guitar effects. The free version was limited to only a few effects running at once, which was annoying and so after I first got UbuStu I never went back. Colin and I used the open source program Ardour for the very first Hello Blacksmith recordings and it wasn't the greatest and didn't have as many features, it was open source.
Open source is something I support very strongly, it gives users the power to add the functionality that they want, ever improving the program. And as long as each version is maintained, it can result in very powerful tools, like GIMP, which has almost all the functionality as Adobe Photoshop. Granted, GIMP is a lot less user friendly and its window management still makes me almost smash things in anger, it works. Ardour has a lot of features that are great and recording and editing are very easy to do. Its main weak points are that it is all simplistic, you can do the basic editing functions, cutting, moving, layering, and looping. It doesn't have very many manipulation tools and the ones it has are weak and don't change all too much.
From that summary of each alone I don't see why I wouldn't use the more powerful Live! for producing the upcoming Hello Blacksmith EP, right? Wrong. (Doesn't that wording just make you feel bad inside? Sorry, just a common way to say something, no harm against you) The price point of Live! is $400. But Martin, you support free information and so why don't you just steal the full version and use that? Well, I do have a full copy it, and using it is quite great. But, I cannot bring myself to use stolen property to create something that I will be selling for money. It is an issue I haven't encountered until now because I never sell anything I make in copyrighted applications. Having to think about the decision, it wasn't a hard choice at all to use open source programs instead of pirated ones. I knew the answer as soon as I asked myself the question, and I guess I could have said that in the first paragraph but there should be some point to reading this far.
So, just so you know, and I don't know if HBS will advertise this on the CDs or not, but we use only open source applications in the production of our music. The sound is edited in (as of right now) Ardour and the images are modified in GIMP. I hope that eases your conscious a little bit.