I’ve heard this ‘rumour’ plenty of times, I always suspected it was true and Adobe have said similar things about their software.

If you are going to pirate, Microsoft wants you to pirate their software as when you go legit you are already locked in to their proprietary system.

All the more grounds for OSS if you ask me.

A senior Microsoft exec has admitted that some software piracy actually ends up benefiting the technology giant because it leads to purchases of other software packages.

In this way, some software pirates who might otherwise never try Microsoft products become paying customers, according to Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes.

“If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” Raikes told delegates at last week’s Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco, Information Week reports.

A pay as you go model for lower income countries? Sounds interesting.

Rather than saying that piracy isn’t a problem per-se, Raikes reckons that between 20 and 25 per cent of US software is pirated, he argues pragmatically that it can have benefits over the long-run. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” Raikes said. “What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software,” he said.

Although Microsoft has no intentions of scaling down (much less abandoning) its effort to chase software counterfeiters, Raikes argues that it’s against its interests to push illegitimate users so hard that they wind up using alternative products. “You want to push towards getting legal licensing, but you don’t want to push so hard that you lose the asset that’s most fundamental in the business,” Raikes said, adding that Microsoft is developing “pay-as-you-go” software pricing models in a bid to encourage low-income people in emerging countries to use its technology.

So basically go ahead, pirate MS. Not so say we support Piracy as we don’t we support Open Source and the freedom to modify and control your own software infrastructure (especially useful when it comes to security).

Security through obscurity and patches with a 1 month lead time is never good.

Come let’s pirate Ubuntu instead.

Source: The Register