On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 07:10:07PM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote: > On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 10:59:23AM -0700, Eric Murray wrote: > > Microsoft does not do things simply because they enjoy being evil. > > They are not so worried about Linux (with its small share of the market) > > that they will spend mega-bucks now on a very long term project that might > > possibly let them keep it off some PCs in the far future. They _are_ > > concerned with getting paid for the 50% of their software that isn't > > paid for. There's a shitload of money there, and if getting at some of > > it costs a little, well, its still more profit than they would > > have gotten otherwise. > > Isn't it much simpler for them to just write into their OS the ability to > snitch on what M$ software was on the users machine everytime they go online? In > fact, I've been assuming that everything from w98 on did exactly that. And > wouldn't it be trivial for them to check for cracked serial numbers, or > duplicate serial numbers?
I don't think 98 does it, but XP does. It just raised the bar a bit-- there was a pirate version of Office XP out before the legal version. Eric
