Somalian pirates make money by holding ships/cargo hostage and selling it back to the original owner at a discount/ransom. Or they sell the product on the black market.

I'm assuming there's no sales of cracked software by the crackers themselves, so no black market sales. It's a hidden community, so it can't be for social status or getting laid. That leaves ransom as a financial motivation.

Is this prevalent with the software industry? I haven't heard anything, but perhaps it occurs behind the scenes. I just trying to determine the motivation of spending so many hours doing high level work without pay.

The old excuse was because crackers felt it was wrong to protect software and mega-companies charge to much. Now they hack software that's $30 written by a lone independent individual. That's sad, IMHO.

most of them do it for fun I think, and there surely is a community of them so they probably do it for status also. It's like here on gearslutz people have lists of their equipment and links to songs they mixed in their sig and the pirates probably have lists of apps they've cracked in their sig on their forums.