Indian cracks Microsoft's antipiracy program 16863

You COLA lamers only think that Microsoft said these things about WGA. See

A short tour of the warez groups shows just about every software package ever sold to have been cracked multiple times. Windows versions with the site license codes supplied are readily available there, too. These versions don't even bother with the registration codes and pbutt the WGA immediately.

Microsoft provides a great value deal to the OEMs who readily pay the license fees to Microsoft and give the software to their customers as part of the OEM's package deal. These licenses are easy to track. Corporate licenses are negotiated annually at fixed fees, so the number of copies in use has no effect. Retail box sales are easy to trace, too. That only leaves the fringe folk who have an old computer and don't want to pay for the update, but would like to use it anyway, but these people probably already have some older version of Windows that they would continue to use if they couldn't get the upgrade for nothing. Then there are the hobbyists who build computers from scratch and just copy an OS from another machine. By the time you get to this level, who cares? You've gotten 99% or more of the potential business and it would cost more than is left over to try to get the rest of the money.

As I have said a number of times, I believe that MS doesn't really give a damn about the pirates and only goes through the motions because some people expect it. I'm sure they recognize that they can only drive the pirates away to other things, such as linux or OO, and can never make them customers. It is far better to make them dependent on Windows just like the paying customers so that someday they may recognized that it is easier to pay than to go to the trouble to pooch a copy somewhere else.

Silly idea. Commercial software companies have huge QA staffs. OSS, OTOH, relies solely on their users for all QA. The notion that this QA is the "price" that the users pay to compensate the OSS developers for their time is often cited by the OSS freeloaders here.