4 ms·

Windows Is Free for Business (2008)

29 points by walterbell 2y ago

easton 2y ago
For the first example, Microsoft might point a finger during a audit[1] but if the military had a license and just used a cracked version instead to bypass the activation prompt, I don't think they'd really make a fuss? If it turned out that they were only buying 50% of the licenses they should've been then sure, but if they were buying them and just not typing the license keys in, meh. I seem to recall the network activation server for Windows let you activate unlimited clients on a key, although maybe I'm misremembering, or the person who configured it did something funny. --- [1]: Does Microsoft even do first party license audits anymore? I'd imagine with so much of the licensing being a part of cloud spend that they don't care since you're already paying $20+ per month per head anyway for windows and office.
- my123 2y ago
  Yes they do audits all the time. They outsource them to one of the big accounting/audit firms though.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  When the company I worked for for 20 years was sold to a muuuch larger company, people from the new company were telling us how they just finished a big audit from MS and they did well and they were so happy they came out more or less clean. Not just relieved they made it through a trial that some douchebags imposed on them, actually pleased with themselves for pleaseing MS is what it almost felt like. I was boggled that anyone would be happy about any part of that. I had successfully avoided letting us ever rely on any MS services other than most people's desktops were Windows. I can't even imagine so much as letting MS or anyone else even in the building to go through our shit to satisfy their desire to know if any of our machines were running any of their software. I'm sure it's part of some license agreement that you agree to be subject to audits or else you don't get to buy the stuff at all but still. I can't imagine being pleased that some douchebags have audited me and said I was a good boy this year. As a linux user it boggles me what people are willing to put up with and consider it not only normal but even valid. I'm not full Stallman and I will use proprietary stuff when I have to, and deal with it's terms, but I never even slightly actually internalize the vendors ideas about what I should do.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I can't imagine not seeing the value in using the MS stack in the enterprise world.
    - esafak 2y ago
      I see value in avoiding it. Avoiding junk is commonsense no?
      - 999900000999 2y ago
        Not everyone is a Linux user, or willing to become one. You can install Ubuntu on 100 Thinkpads and have that be the official OS of your company. The tech folks will love it, but Mr Smith in accounting will be angry and confused. QuickBooks doesn't work, how will he get anything done ? He doesn't want an open source alternative. He wants QuickBooks.
        bongodongobob 2y ago
        This is absolutely on point. Every time Microsoft comes up, HN thinks you can just replace an orgs 30 year old stack with OSS. It's ridiculous and shows the narrow experience of this crowd with their small teams.
        999900000999 2y ago
        Linux still doesn't have a lot of one to one equivalents for Microsoft software. If Mr Smith in accounting likes using QuickBooks and Excel, you can't just tell him it's time to switch to libre office. I definitely think Linux is better for personal usage, but I don't expect most companies to ever realistically roll it out to every desktop.
        lostmsu 2y ago
        I still did not find a descent email client. What could be more personal than that?
- toast0 2y ago
  For the US Military pirating software while on deployment in Iraq, Microsoft would need to seek redress in Iraq's court system. 28 U.S. Code § 1498 [1] holds the federal government liable for copyright infringement (section b), but only in the US (c). I don't know how much copyright enforcement Iraqi courts were doing during the occupation, and the US Military was operating with broad immunity from Iraqi law as well. There's no reason for Microsoft to make a fuss over this infringement, because they're not going to get compensated and the PR will be negative. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1498 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1498
pjmlp 2y ago
During the 8 and 16 bit home computing days, buying legit software in Portugal was almost impossible, even the boxes being sold at some stores were actually illegal copies, and it used to be common in the late 1990's that photocopy places near universities had catalogs with software to get copies from. Eventually there was some crackdown from SPA in cooperation with the police forces, and most businesses nowadays run legit, however I will gladly bet than there are still plenty of business that do not, especially in small towns. Also that we aren't the only country where it goes like that.
- d_k_f 2y ago
  This article about software piracy in Italy in the 80s and 90s was linked here some time ago: https://genesistemple.com/a-swashbuckling-tale-of-italian-software-piracy-1983-1993 https://genesistemple.com/a-swashbuckling-tale-of-italian-so... – seems to be very similar to your story in Portugal. I don't think it was that extreme here in Germany, but I do recall my father coming home various times throughout the years with cases containing ~20-50 3.5" floppy disks for our Atari STs that were either completely unlabeled or with hand-written or home-printed labels. Always interesting finding out how to start each game and looking at the colourful intros.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Yep, exactly the same kind of stuff. By the way there is a movie that touches this, but from movie industry side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry Back in the 8 bit days, the dream of each teenager was to get a double deck tape recorder, at least for those on Speccy side. Years later on the Amiga, X-Copy was a must have.
kjellsbells 2y ago
2008 to 2025 is an eternity in software. Webapps, and the generation of people who built them (who very likely grew up in the era of desktop apps with activation keys), killed the conversation off. You share your identity with the webapp provider to get access to all but the simplest apps, and there's a tiered access model going from freemium to premium. In particular, freemium attempts to remove that "I just need it for one quick thing" friction. That said, the reasons for piracy remain the same: friction and price. It goes both ways really. People pay for 365 because free Office suites dont quite do what they want and that introduces friction. People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  Seconding your ending statement there: I make good money, and I pay for a lot of software to make my little life spin along, and the little bit of theoretical piracy I consider doing, satirically of course, is far more to do with how onerous the procedure is to acquire the product legally than anything about it's costs. Movies are a great example. If I can stream a given movie on any of the services I already purchase, obviously that's great and I'll do that. Failing that, I'd like to buy it on iTunes as I trust Apple a little more than most others in the space (YMMV). Failing that, if I can buy temporary access on Amazon Prime/YouTube/Whatever, sure. If however I'm essentially expected to fork out yet another $10-$20 on yet another subscription with yet another mediocre app that will slow my Apple TVs to a crawl, or worse, demand the right to shove ads in my face... no. Pass. I also ditched Photoshop's $10/mo subscription after years because the quality of it just kept going down. I remember being so excited when the first update for the M1 Macs dropped, and Photoshop suddenly felt to use like it did in the 2010's; snappy, performant, efficient. And it took barely 3 years for Adobe to manage to bloat it up so it ran like shit again. So I dropped that and spent $50 on Affinity Photo and I couldn't be happier. Granted some things take a few more steps to do in Affinity, but those steps are all quick, snappy and responsive unlike seemingly every action in Photoshop. It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam. Steam isn't perfect, of course, it has it's issues here and there but it made great strides to reduce piracy not by locking the products down so hard and with such onerous software/rootkits/DRM but instead by just making the idea of buying and getting the game so obtusely convenient that pirating it is more work and why spend hours downloading questionable software and carefully going through an installation procedure when you could just wishlist it there, wait for it to go on sale, grab it for $10 and have it in the time it takes you to make a coffee?
jordemort 2y ago
Windows is only free if your time has no value
- ohgr 2y ago
  I take this to extremes. When I was contracting I wouldn’t do anything Microsoft unless I was paid by the hour.
  - an_ko 2y ago
    I believe the post you're replying to is making a joke, referencing a classic complaint/meme that "Linux is only free if your time has no value".
    - skyyler 2y ago
      The thing that makes the joke funny is that it truly has reversed. Fedora KDE spin has been a less painful experience than Windows 11 in every way, for me.
      - vladvasiliu 2y ago
        Indeed, and so has dartos' point. Not even hardware support is a sure thing on windows any longer. And I'm not talking exotic things, just your random enterprise HP laptop.
        p_ing 2y ago
        Are you saying HP is building laptops that ship with Windows that lack drivers provided by HP?
        lynndotpy 2y ago
        Judging by the state of bluetooth and compatibility with their own docks, that might literally be the case.
        2y ago
pelagicAustral 2y ago
I was part of BizSpark around 2014, for 5 years all my licenses were free as a way to help small businesses, and I truly mean all licenses, whatever you can think of I had a license for... They killed that project of course, when if fact it was an amazing way to tie small businesses and their clients to Microsoft stack tech.
- intrasight 2y ago
  Man, I miss BizSpark.
  - notpushkin 2y ago
    I was in high school in those days, so it was DreamSpark for me. They didn’t have regular Windows licenses but had free Windows Server, so of course I was running one on my laptop for a while.
RajT88 2y ago
There still is a relatively easy Windows10/11 activation crack - which Microsoft support has even been caught sharing with customers. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-support-cracks-windows-for-customer-after-activation-fails/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sup... Back in the late aughts, there was an article from someone at Microsoft talking about how they weren't that interested in going after people pirating Windows in the developing world, because they saw it as an opportunity for turning them into paying customers. Really - that piracy is expanding the Microsoft ecosystem, which back then was important because they viewed Linux on the desktop as a huge threat. (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?) The ease with which Windows is cracked still is probably no accident, but nobody's talking about it. If you're running a business at some point your security folks are going to point out that using cracked software is how you invite attackers inside your security perimeter. (Seriously, down that path lies losing all of your bank accounts)
- thesuitonym 2y ago
  It's weird that anyone even bothers cracking Windows when you could just use it forever without activating it. Everything works except some personalization features--and even those limitations are easy to get around.
- alekratz 2y ago
  > (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?) I know this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but I would argue that the year of the Linux desktop was in 2022 when the Steam deck, albeit a non-desktop machine, was released. It's a pretty popular console and really forwarded the idea of playing video games on Linux being seamless. The state of gaming on Linux is/was one of the main reason why so many people are/were holding out on Windows, and with a few exceptions of massive games like Fortnite, it's basically here. Adoption, however, is a different story.
  - peepee1982 2y ago
    I'm not entirely convinced about that. We'll see when a more generalized desktop distro comes along and gains traction with gamers. So far, Linux hasn't really made the jump from the Steam Deck to the desktop. I haven't seen a mass migration of gamers from Windows to Linux yet. As long as Windows offers even a marginally better experience, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Additionally, there are still many types of software that either don't run on Linux or don't perform as well. I primarily use my PC for music production, and that pretty much rules out using Linux unless I'm willing to spend more time configuring things or risk potential compatibility issues. I do wish I could switch to a Linux desktop without feeling like a second-class citizen in certain areas. I prefer writing web applications on Linux, but with WSL working well enough, I’m too lazy to dual boot just for that. That said, I'm looking forward to installing Arch on my old laptop. I may be an adult with a full-time job, kids, and little free time, but I'm still a nerd at heart.

29 points by walterbell 2y ago

For the first example, Microsoft might point a finger during a audit[1] but if the military had a license and just used a cracked version instead to bypass the activation prompt, I don't think they'd really make a fuss? If it turned out that they were only buying 50% of the licenses they should've been then sure, but if they were buying them and just not typing the license keys in, meh. I seem to recall the network activation server for Windows let you activate unlimited clients on a key, although maybe I'm misremembering, or the person who configured it did something funny. --- [1]: Does Microsoft even do first party license audits anymore? I'd imagine with so much of the licensing being a part of cloud spend that they don't care since you're already paying $20+ per month per head anyway for windows and office.

my123 2y ago
Yes they do audits all the time. They outsource them to one of the big accounting/audit firms though.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
When the company I worked for for 20 years was sold to a muuuch larger company, people from the new company were telling us how they just finished a big audit from MS and they did well and they were so happy they came out more or less clean. Not just relieved they made it through a trial that some douchebags imposed on them, actually pleased with themselves for pleaseing MS is what it almost felt like. I was boggled that anyone would be happy about any part of that. I had successfully avoided letting us ever rely on any MS services other than most people's desktops were Windows. I can't even imagine so much as letting MS or anyone else even in the building to go through our shit to satisfy their desire to know if any of our machines were running any of their software. I'm sure it's part of some license agreement that you agree to be subject to audits or else you don't get to buy the stuff at all but still. I can't imagine being pleased that some douchebags have audited me and said I was a good boy this year. As a linux user it boggles me what people are willing to put up with and consider it not only normal but even valid. I'm not full Stallman and I will use proprietary stuff when I have to, and deal with it's terms, but I never even slightly actually internalize the vendors ideas about what I should do.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I can't imagine not seeing the value in using the MS stack in the enterprise world.
  - esafak 2y ago
    I see value in avoiding it. Avoiding junk is commonsense no?
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      Not everyone is a Linux user, or willing to become one. You can install Ubuntu on 100 Thinkpads and have that be the official OS of your company. The tech folks will love it, but Mr Smith in accounting will be angry and confused. QuickBooks doesn't work, how will he get anything done ? He doesn't want an open source alternative. He wants QuickBooks.
      - bongodongobob 2y ago
        This is absolutely on point. Every time Microsoft comes up, HN thinks you can just replace an orgs 30 year old stack with OSS. It's ridiculous and shows the narrow experience of this crowd with their small teams.
        999900000999 2y ago
        Linux still doesn't have a lot of one to one equivalents for Microsoft software. If Mr Smith in accounting likes using QuickBooks and Excel, you can't just tell him it's time to switch to libre office. I definitely think Linux is better for personal usage, but I don't expect most companies to ever realistically roll it out to every desktop.
        lostmsu 2y ago
        I still did not find a descent email client. What could be more personal than that?
toast0 2y ago
For the US Military pirating software while on deployment in Iraq, Microsoft would need to seek redress in Iraq's court system. 28 U.S. Code § 1498 [1] holds the federal government liable for copyright infringement (section b), but only in the US (c). I don't know how much copyright enforcement Iraqi courts were doing during the occupation, and the US Military was operating with broad immunity from Iraqi law as well. There's no reason for Microsoft to make a fuss over this infringement, because they're not going to get compensated and the PR will be negative. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1498 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1498

pjmlp 2y ago

During the 8 and 16 bit home computing days, buying legit software in Portugal was almost impossible, even the boxes being sold at some stores were actually illegal copies, and it used to be common in the late 1990's that photocopy places near universities had catalogs with software to get copies from. Eventually there was some crackdown from SPA in cooperation with the police forces, and most businesses nowadays run legit, however I will gladly bet than there are still plenty of business that do not, especially in small towns. Also that we aren't the only country where it goes like that.

d_k_f 2y ago
This article about software piracy in Italy in the 80s and 90s was linked here some time ago: https://genesistemple.com/a-swashbuckling-tale-of-italian-software-piracy-1983-1993 https://genesistemple.com/a-swashbuckling-tale-of-italian-so... – seems to be very similar to your story in Portugal. I don't think it was that extreme here in Germany, but I do recall my father coming home various times throughout the years with cases containing ~20-50 3.5" floppy disks for our Atari STs that were either completely unlabeled or with hand-written or home-printed labels. Always interesting finding out how to start each game and looking at the colourful intros.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Yep, exactly the same kind of stuff. By the way there is a movie that touches this, but from movie industry side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry Back in the 8 bit days, the dream of each teenager was to get a double deck tape recorder, at least for those on Speccy side. Years later on the Amiga, X-Copy was a must have.

kjellsbells 2y ago

2008 to 2025 is an eternity in software. Webapps, and the generation of people who built them (who very likely grew up in the era of desktop apps with activation keys), killed the conversation off. You share your identity with the webapp provider to get access to all but the simplest apps, and there's a tiered access model going from freemium to premium. In particular, freemium attempts to remove that "I just need it for one quick thing" friction. That said, the reasons for piracy remain the same: friction and price. It goes both ways really. People pay for 365 because free Office suites dont quite do what they want and that introduces friction. People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Seconding your ending statement there: I make good money, and I pay for a lot of software to make my little life spin along, and the little bit of theoretical piracy I consider doing, satirically of course, is far more to do with how onerous the procedure is to acquire the product legally than anything about it's costs. Movies are a great example. If I can stream a given movie on any of the services I already purchase, obviously that's great and I'll do that. Failing that, I'd like to buy it on iTunes as I trust Apple a little more than most others in the space (YMMV). Failing that, if I can buy temporary access on Amazon Prime/YouTube/Whatever, sure. If however I'm essentially expected to fork out yet another $10-$20 on yet another subscription with yet another mediocre app that will slow my Apple TVs to a crawl, or worse, demand the right to shove ads in my face... no. Pass. I also ditched Photoshop's $10/mo subscription after years because the quality of it just kept going down. I remember being so excited when the first update for the M1 Macs dropped, and Photoshop suddenly felt to use like it did in the 2010's; snappy, performant, efficient. And it took barely 3 years for Adobe to manage to bloat it up so it ran like shit again. So I dropped that and spent $50 on Affinity Photo and I couldn't be happier. Granted some things take a few more steps to do in Affinity, but those steps are all quick, snappy and responsive unlike seemingly every action in Photoshop. It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam. Steam isn't perfect, of course, it has it's issues here and there but it made great strides to reduce piracy not by locking the products down so hard and with such onerous software/rootkits/DRM but instead by just making the idea of buying and getting the game so obtusely convenient that pirating it is more work and why spend hours downloading questionable software and carefully going through an installation procedure when you could just wishlist it there, wait for it to go on sale, grab it for $10 and have it in the time it takes you to make a coffee?

jordemort 2y ago

Windows is only free if your time has no value

ohgr 2y ago
I take this to extremes. When I was contracting I wouldn’t do anything Microsoft unless I was paid by the hour.
- an_ko 2y ago
  I believe the post you're replying to is making a joke, referencing a classic complaint/meme that "Linux is only free if your time has no value".
  - skyyler 2y ago
    The thing that makes the joke funny is that it truly has reversed. Fedora KDE spin has been a less painful experience than Windows 11 in every way, for me.
    - vladvasiliu 2y ago
      Indeed, and so has dartos' point. Not even hardware support is a sure thing on windows any longer. And I'm not talking exotic things, just your random enterprise HP laptop.
      - p_ing 2y ago
        Are you saying HP is building laptops that ship with Windows that lack drivers provided by HP?
        lynndotpy 2y ago
        Judging by the state of bluetooth and compatibility with their own docks, that might literally be the case.
        2y ago

pelagicAustral 2y ago

I was part of BizSpark around 2014, for 5 years all my licenses were free as a way to help small businesses, and I truly mean all licenses, whatever you can think of I had a license for... They killed that project of course, when if fact it was an amazing way to tie small businesses and their clients to Microsoft stack tech.

intrasight 2y ago
Man, I miss BizSpark.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  I was in high school in those days, so it was DreamSpark for me. They didn’t have regular Windows licenses but had free Windows Server, so of course I was running one on my laptop for a while.

RajT88 2y ago

There still is a relatively easy Windows10/11 activation crack - which Microsoft support has even been caught sharing with customers. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-support-cracks-windows-for-customer-after-activation-fails/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sup... Back in the late aughts, there was an article from someone at Microsoft talking about how they weren't that interested in going after people pirating Windows in the developing world, because they saw it as an opportunity for turning them into paying customers. Really - that piracy is expanding the Microsoft ecosystem, which back then was important because they viewed Linux on the desktop as a huge threat. (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?) The ease with which Windows is cracked still is probably no accident, but nobody's talking about it. If you're running a business at some point your security folks are going to point out that using cracked software is how you invite attackers inside your security perimeter. (Seriously, down that path lies losing all of your bank accounts)

thesuitonym 2y ago
It's weird that anyone even bothers cracking Windows when you could just use it forever without activating it. Everything works except some personalization features--and even those limitations are easy to get around.
alekratz 2y ago
> (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?) I know this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but I would argue that the year of the Linux desktop was in 2022 when the Steam deck, albeit a non-desktop machine, was released. It's a pretty popular console and really forwarded the idea of playing video games on Linux being seamless. The state of gaming on Linux is/was one of the main reason why so many people are/were holding out on Windows, and with a few exceptions of massive games like Fortnite, it's basically here. Adoption, however, is a different story.
- peepee1982 2y ago
  I'm not entirely convinced about that. We'll see when a more generalized desktop distro comes along and gains traction with gamers. So far, Linux hasn't really made the jump from the Steam Deck to the desktop. I haven't seen a mass migration of gamers from Windows to Linux yet. As long as Windows offers even a marginally better experience, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Additionally, there are still many types of software that either don't run on Linux or don't perform as well. I primarily use my PC for music production, and that pretty much rules out using Linux unless I'm willing to spend more time configuring things or risk potential compatibility issues. I do wish I could switch to a Linux desktop without feeling like a second-class citizen in certain areas. I prefer writing web applications on Linux, but with WSL working well enough, I’m too lazy to dual boot just for that. That said, I'm looking forward to installing Arch on my old laptop. I may be an adult with a full-time job, kids, and little free time, but I'm still a nerd at heart.