[Context is Roy said bad things about WGA.]
"Hadron Quark" <hadronquark@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:87r6zj5ogm.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxx
Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
__/ [ Hadron Quark ] on Monday 14 August 2006 15:32 \__
You seem to openly encourage and support piracy of MS Operating
Systems. Just because most Gnu/Linux installations are free, it doesnt
mean MS have to give stufff away. WGA is a natural respsonse to people
thieving their work.
You are shoving words right into my mouth. Not nice. It was flatfish+++
that
did this the last time (when I had linked to a site without carefully
reading the article contained therein). Conveniently (for you), all but
WGA
was omitted in your rebuttal. I also mentioned:
How else will they know if the SW is pirated if thes dont check?
They don't actually have to know.
Let's take a step back for a second, and ask ourselves why we want to
get rid of piracy in the first place. Piracy is "bad" because it means
developers worked hard on software, and aren't getting compensated for their
work. So basically developers want to get rid of piracy because they want
more money. Which is fine; this is a business, and it's not unreasonable to
want more money in a business context.
Every business has its costs associated with it. Piracy is one of the
costs in working in the retail software industry. For buffet restaurants,
there's a base cost of putting food on the buffet, regardless of whether or
not you get any customers that day. For shops, you need someone at the
register whether or not anyone buys anything. Etc. You can minimize the
costs, but if you push too hard, you'll lose out on income too. If you put
less food on the buffet, it'll look less enticing, and you'll have fewer
customers. Put fewer people at cash registers, and some shopers will get
impatient waiting in long lines and just leave. Make your copyprotectiong
system too annoying, and people will start looking at alternative softwares.
There's no "good" or "evil" in my analysis here; it's all about money.
Microsoft is getting dangerously into the "annoy your customers" territory,
and it just doesn't make good business sense. Better to tolerate a few
pirates and deliver a quality product, than to have zero pirates, and a
product so unusable that they end up having zero customers as well.
Microsoft is one of the richest corporations in the world, if not *THE*
richest. And they got there *BEFORE* their allegedly excessive copy
protection scheme. So obviously it's possible to make good profit even with
the existence of some pirates.
- Oliver
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