Basically, the idea is that a lot of students/indies/freelancers will at some point end up working for a larger company which does use licenced copies. If the majority of employees prefers, say, Blender over Maya, then the company is either less likely to use Maya altogether or at least won’t buy as many Maya licences. So yeah, as many people as possible preferring to work with and being familiar with Autodesk software is definitely sth that would be in their best interest, considering a lot of the people we’re talking about would never have been able to afford legal Maya licences, anyway. So Autodesk isn’t going to lose out on money when those people pirate their software but they are going to have a weaker overall standing in the industry if those people choose to learn Blender instead of Maya. Of course, though, that still doesn’t make it legal.