Half of Australians think stealing Windows is OK

On a point of order.....

OK Microsoft has made LOTS and LOTS of really shitty software - that performs poorly or is such utter junk; and it is infestable with everything.

So given that if perhaps I were to say in nice round figures - spend $5000 on home software over the last 20 years.

If I were to deduct the amount of extra money I have had to spend on antivirus software work arounds, alternative software etc., all the hours I have had... no make that all the MONTHS and MONTHS I have had to spend scanning and debugging the software; and all the time I have had to spend working on and repairing or replacing all the "incredibly shit" software and all the problems it has created for me...

i.e. If Microsoft Defender is so great it picks up NOTHING, and yet 3 other antivirals picked up a number of small infestations....

This is SO typically Microsoft.

Ummmmmm as a home grown IT department manager, how much then, would Microsoft owe me?

If they are quite at liberty to release crapware onto the market; for the mass consumer perpetual beta testing, then they either ought to pay us all, OR not expect payment for their crapware and ALL of the very time intensive and expensive and lost productivity - that their rolling hatchet jobs have cost everyone else.

I bet this concept wasn't in their garbage survey.

I seriously considered pirating Office recently. I unfortunately need it because OpenOffice screws up the formatting on documents I collaborate on.

But while the Windows version is a reasonable AU$75 for academic use, the Mac version is AU$229. That's beyond a joke.

For the moment I'm running the Windows version in VMware... but that's not a long-term solution.

At work we use windows, we pay annually for an enterprise agreement covering all our computers, therefore we don't need to pay for the OS when we buy the computers. However it's extreemly difficult to buy a pc without windows (small computer shops don't count - we buy many computers and need the consistency and next day warranty that only a large OEM can supply). Dell could provide computers sans windows, but there was no discount in the price.......... I'm sick of it - at home I've ditched my pirated WinXP and moved to Linux. For everyone else I scratch off the stupid OEM license stickers we don't need but paid for anyway and hand them out for free (as in beer).... GO TO HELL MICROSOFT!!!!!

You forgot to mention one thing : DRM is going to stop group 2 (morons), and seriously bother group 4 (legitimate users). Pirates are the only users who are not bothered by DRM.

Here's the deal: piracy cannot be stopped. There are too many hackers out there that are at least as intelligent as the DRM programmers. That and it's almost impossible to catch them. Let's look at the market. There are four types of people: people that will never buy/use the software (these people are lost to the company); people that will steal the software if it's easy, but will be stymied by DRM (this is a very small or non-existent group); people that will defeat DRM protected software regardless (this includes pretty much all the "pirates"); and people that will legally buy software due to moral or legal obligation (this is everyone else). DRM only stops group two (the stupid/uncreative pirates), a group that I believe is very, very small. There will be always be people that will steal it: making that number zero, or stopping them by (always futile) DRM is a useless exercise. Piracy is a calculated risk that can only be mitigated by price, not programming. Lower the price, and more people will cough up the money. That's simple economics, with the non-customer group also including people that stole the product. @RIAA and all those DRM-fiends: YOU CANT STOP PIRACY! Mitigate the losses with a better pricing scheme and stop wasting money on DRM. Think of it this way: software/media/music is like water. Legal "water" is bottled water - priced premium for people that are willing to pay for a marginally better product. Pirated "water" is from the tap - virtually free. If you want more money, you have to lower the price to get more people to buy it - or raise the price, as the not that many people that already buy it will stop buying it. Trying to make tap "water" sound 'unsafe' or 'tainted' is a load of bull and only makes you look like an idiot to those of us who recognize that there is only a minimal difference.

While Bill Gates states horrendous lies like : "VISTA R&D cost is greater than sending a man on the moon" , they sell WinXP+MS OfficeXP for 30$ in Thailand, Vietnam and China. What costs could you have, you eugenistic prick? Besides the salaries of your 3000 programmers & 1000 testers ... what more is there? The light bill? The gas cost? The salaries of the mexicans in the packaging plant? Come on ... The prices of software these days are sooooo bloated ! If the software would have prices between 11$ and 50$ for usual stuff & games and 100$ for special ones such as ArhiCAD or Win2003 server, there would be NO piracy.

On the one hand several million Australians think piracy is acceptable, on the other a handful of high court judges and corporate executives thinks its unacceptable. Mmmmm, Democracy is all about majority rule and Australia is a democracy - so i'm having to go with the majority and say piracy is acceptable.

Robert states "56..% of Americans think Piracy of all matter is acceptable, but they are wrong as the judicial system has demonstrated to these people".
They are not wrong - it is acceptable to them. The fact that it is not acceptable to the judiciary does not alter that. "Wrong" and "against the law" are two different things. The law allows greedy corporate thieves like Bill Gates to fleece huge amounts of money from innocent people, but that does not make it right. Similarly the legal system in Nigeria had an innocent man trying to speak out against the oil companies raping his country executed - it was legal, but hardly right.

The definition of stealing I am familiar with used to include the clause "with the intent to permanently deprive", to differentiate theft from borrowing. So far as I can see, when software is copied, the owner is not deprived at all - they still have what was "stolen". Copying software may well be illegal, and to some degree immoral, but is it really stealing?

@interested_party

I share your sentiments over MS's garbage products, laughable *security* and customer relations policies. I am hoping that you -- as a Windows user -- have a girlfriend and that your social life is going well. Assuming that is so, perhaps you feel secure enough in your *social life* to actually try Linux and OpenOffice?

I use it, my wife uses it, my kids use it, and my 83 yr old father uses it. It is very easy to use and install, so anything you may have heard to the contrary is probably inaccurate. Ubuntu would be a good place to start.

Why do companies always think if they stop someone pirating, the person will automatically buy the product? To me all what Copy protection, DRM, anti-piracy campaigns etc did is driving me further away from the software.

The Windows operating system did only so well because Windows 95 was mostly pirated.

I also don't understand the "If only Linux wasn't some half-baked, nerds-only, no real-life, no girlfriend, lame installation procedure then MS might have to treat customers ok." comment. Yesterday I installed Vista SP1 and couldn't set the correct screen resolution out-of-box, so I wanted to download the driver, but also the network driver was missing - and it is not a new nic-chipset. I had far fewer problems with any of the later (past 3+ years) Linux distributions.

first time in almost 2 decades, I would actually shell out money and buy a MS OS. the other's i've used either came pre-loaded or acquired by other means.

...think Piracy of all matter is acceptable, but they are wrong as the judicial system has demonstrated to these people.

If MS are going down the road of releasing loads of different versions then I'm glad that MS are getting screwed out of some money. XP Pro and Home were a pain in the ass, should onl have ever been Pro. Same with Vista, and now even more so with Win7.

If only Linux wasn't some half-baked, nerds-only, no real-life, no girlfriend, lame installation procedure then MS might have to treat customers ok.

Using Windows is *never* OK - no matter how you got it.

I have legal copies of Vista and XP.
It's the necessity of re-authentication that's the problem. I frequently change hardware on my computer(s) and got so angry about calling Microsoft to authenticate and answering their stupid questions that I have gone "piracy" route to get my legal copies to run. Vista OEM was so objectionable and the incredibly stupid one time install that I now have dual boot (bios changeable) for each drive and my own means to authenticate either OS on a reinstall.
One would think that MS would get tired of shooting themselves in the foot.
As for Open Office, it's great why would you want that other bloated crap anyway?

Office software: nice wheels to put under you matter transporter.

Microsoft have gone to great lengths to subsidise the cost of Office software. They have launched the "It's not cheating" initiative in many countries including Australia - (www.itsnotcheating.com.au).

You can buy Office Ultimate 2007 for AUD $75. This is equivalent to $48 USD or 33 GBP. You get a 2 user license and all you need to be to qualify is a student or teacher in any tertiary institute in Australia. Hard to pass up.

People spend much more on a night out in town. Yet the software will actually produce something useful and constructive.

Then again, there's another alternative. You don't like paying for software? No worries, try Open Office. Office equivalent, not nearly as featured but hey, it works. Then again, MS would probably rather you pirate their wares than to use OO.