> You are making a variant on the 'piracy losses' argument which has been shown is simply a pricing issue. That works for individuals. In many (most?) countrie

> You are making a variant on the 'piracy losses' argument which has been shown is simply a pricing issue. That works for individuals. In many (most?) countries, the calculus for companies is vastly different. It takes one disgruntled employee or a bad dice roll to end up being audited for use of pirated software; between the regulators in many countries being on the side of the copyright holders on this, and the company itself being a much easier and juicer legal target than a bunch of regular people, the costs of getting caught using a bootleg Windows copy commercially far outweighs the costs of just licensing it. With Windows also providing genuine value, the choice for companies isn't between licensing or pirating - it's between licensing, or sacrificing some other part of the business to scrounge up money for licensing, or not doing the business in the first place. (Yes, the boundary between individuals and companies is fuzzy; this argument is somewhat weak for some classes of sole proprietorships, but generally solidifies quickly as the headcount of an org grows towards double-digit numbers.)