Microsoft has a surprise for “pirates” alright. It’s a surprise involving the fact that there’s nothing to “pirate” in Vista.
If you were trying to stop people from infringing on your licensing scheme, what would you do? You’d disable the ability of said people to use your software, right? Or at least give it your best shot. After all, unless you’re meerly providing services on top of a software stack those sales are your livelihood!
Not so for Microsoft. What they’re going to do is disable some of the glitter on non-licensed or illigitimate looking copies of Windows. So go ahead and don’t bother to properly license their software, they don’t mind. No glitter for you though.
What this amounts to is Microsoft sanctioning the illicit use of their software to further market share. There’s no doubt in my mind that they simply want to spread their software, viral like, all over the globe even at no cost.
Once there’s no competition, they can tighten the screws on anyone that doesn’t have a legit copy. The minute that no competitor exists all those copies of windows would go from ‘degraded’ to ‘non-functional’ in a heartbeat.
Vista has a surprise for pirates | News.blog | CNET News.com
