Windows Is Free for Business (2008)
14 comments
·March 3, 2025kjellsbells
ToucanLoucan
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?
pjmlp
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.
jordemort
Windows is only free if your time has no value
dartos
I’ve paid many $1000s of dollars in my time to the Linux gods.
Audio driver issues.
Graphics driver issues.
WiFi driver issues.
but I still like Linux more than windows.
ohgr
I take this to extremes. When I was contracting I wouldn’t do anything Microsoft unless I was paid by the hour.
an_ko
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
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.
sph
Worse, Windows is free if your attention has no value. Being bombarded with ads and spied upon is worse than wasting my time.
dredmorbius
For those not twigging the reference:
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski>.
That said, well played.
pelagicAustral
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
Man, I miss BizSpark.
easton
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.
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[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
Yes they do audits all the time. They outsource them to one of the big accounting/audit firms though.
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.