Greg K — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:36:52 +0000

I remember back in the early 90's it was rumoured that there was an internal memo from Microsoft that said that windows 3.11 owed a lot of it's popularity to illegal copies. Heck I used to be guilty of that too, probably still have a set of WFW 3.11 floppies laying around somewhere....

I always loved the one series in the Dilbert comic strip where dilbert finds out that he unknowingly agreed to become Bill Gate's towel boy by installing software... LOL

-Greg

JeevesBond — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:16:24 +0000

Agreed with Greg and Abhi. Microsoft are only carrying out what they have been promising in their EULA's (End User License Agreement) for years. I believe Microsoft was quite happy to ignore piracy among home users as it secures their market share. Now Steve Ballmer is in charge and Microsoft have a very dominant market position, they feel able to squeeze those pirates for some cash.

Some annoying nag-ware and no security updates isn't the end of the world. What Microsoft is getting wrong is penalising legitimate license owners. I've heard stories of businesses have their computers (bought with Windows bundled from Dell) break with WGA, and then the legitimate customer is unable to get a sensible response from Microsoft support. Busy's broke, and countless home users (some high-profile ones too) have been left out in the cold. Microsoft is also being sued over the 'phone home' aspects of WGA, which raise privacy concerns.

But then, it's all in the EULA. When anyone presses 'I Agree' (something that always sends a shiver down my spine, unless the header reads: GNU General Public License) they remove any consumer rights they might have had.

This is the reason many people have switched to Free software--it's free as in 'freedom'--these are the people who actually read what they were signing up to and didn't like it. This just proves they were right all along.

Abhishek Reddy — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 04:02:21 +0000

Quote: So what if you're 30 days late in registering your copy of Vista? You still paid for it, so why should you be treated as a pirate?

Like Greg says, it is in breach of your agreement with Microsoft, so if you object to it, don't purchase, support or use software under such terms -- as, indeed, the author of the article also concludes.

Non-free software vendors' disrespect for their users' rights is a problem; but for an individual user, the solution is simple enough: use free software instead.

Greg K — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 23:27:50 +0000

Fact, software is not a tangible item like a car.

You buy a car, you OWN it. You do with it as you please (you know what I mean)

You buy a LICENSE TO USE software, not OWN IT. You agree when installing the software to abide by the license. YOU ARE AGREEING TO THIS with all that text that we normally skip over and just hit I AGREE.

So you are 30 days late registering the OS? Why should you be treated like a pirate?? Most likely you agreed to this upon install. Simple fact, you don't like their terms, don't install it. There are alternatives.

I have a big rant boiling right now, out of respect for the forum, I will withhold it...

-Greg

Busy — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 21:45:44 +0000

I doubt they will be able to do as they claim, they cliamed similar with XP (not removing stuff) but if you look around there are heaps of key changers for windows XP

The way they did it was with an windows security update/patch, very upfront about it but who reads the descriptions ... After people downloaded the update/patch they could no longer download any more if they didn't have a legite regristed version ... I know a lot of people that got caught out (ok 4), even my copy of windows was deemed bogus but wasn't (got mine fro legite source just had wrong key code), In some ways it was good not having all those HHD hogging updates.

Look at antiviruses, people buy/download them, when they expire they keep working but don't update. People live by the "it wont happen to me" so plod along as normal.

Now would be a great time for linux etc to do some advertising, as a lot of people will get caught out by vista and go security-less. Spam, trojans, viruses, worms, hacked pc's ... will once again flood the system