They have always thought that way about software. All my early-childhood games (even on the Commodore 64) came from copied floppy disks. In my teens I bought my own games, but those were always group-buys: I had copies of all the games my friends bought too, and they had copies of mine.
I don't know. I remember paying for the Borland C compiler, which was quite a lot of money for a teen (like $600 IIRC).
Then I discovered Unix/Linux and so it was the last piece of software I bought.
This is how most people think about software too, since FOSS started.