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Microsoft Sets Value Of Pirated Windows: $1
nick_davison writes "The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has reached a deal with the Indonesian government on pirated software - which is believed to affect around 50,000 government PCs. Under the deal, Indonesia will pay $1 per copy and agree to buy legally in the future. Indonesia's information minister, Sofyan Djalil, said, "Microsoft is being realistic. They can't force developing countries like us to solely use legal software since we can't afford it. They want us to gradually reduce our use of it." Somehow it seems unlikely the same rules will be applied to developing companies and poorer individuals in the United States."
An exchange for Schappelle Corby?
VERITAS VOS LIBERABIT
That's still more than the average /. user values it at.
That's at least a dollar more than I paid for it
"Somehow it seems unlikely the same rules will be applied to developing companies and poorer individuals in the United States."
You scream Linux, OpenOffice and not bluff you'll get big discounts. MS is rich because people simply pay up. Start being an *informed* consumer, markets work better that way.
Deleted
So this explains the MS sponsored TCO researches saying Windows is cheaper.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
fools! MS would rather PAY YOU to maintain its monopoly and mindshare than have you turn to linux.
The Indonesian information minister's statement is ridiculous: "They can't force developing countries like us to solely use legal software since we can't afford it." WTF? Why not? If you can afford Windows, give it a shot. If you can't, try OSS. It'll work. Maybe better, maybe worse. But you sure as hell can be forced to do things legally.
It's not like they're being forced to pay outrageous prices for their sole source of food or something. They have a choice of software, and they choose an expensive, proprietary, non-free one. The shiny, fancy one. Guess what? It costs money.
I always like to use free stuff.
GPL - Free as in mine
BSD/X11/MIT - Free as in not closed yet
CDDL - Free as in slave labor
Apache - Free as in complicated
Microsoft - Free as in stolen
Did I miss any?
Tharkban (It is a signature after all)
A little more research on google news shows that MS is denying this report.
Look at just about *any* large software company that sells to businesses. Their goal is to get you locked-in to a software package, and then milk as much money as they possibly can from you. The real money to be made is in hidden costs. Sure, Bob the Purchasing Manager *thinks* that he's bought a copy of the software, but in fact he's signed off on spending money on the software package for the next fifteen years until the company is frusterated enough to ante up enough money to jump ship to another package.
And the best tool of all in the software world to squeeze those-money engorged corporate udders is incompatibility -- file formats, APIs and protocols that only *you* can provide. (And user expertise in your software.)
The smart purchaser stays the hell away from any proprietary file formats, APIs and protocols.
The main reason that the open source world is nice for the corporate world is not the up-front price benefits. It's the fact that open source software inherently has non-proprietary file formats, APIs, and protocols, means that a choice of open source software ensures that you can't be milked (well, *too* much) or else someone else will toddle on in and start providing an alternative.
Consider an example: People using Subversion for their source control aren't going to pay a cent for anything in the future. Even if Subversion cost $5000 a seat, instead of being gratis, it would still mean only a one-time payment. People using ClearCase have many years of rich milk-giving ahead of them.
Microsoft lets people use Windows for minimal cost in areas that it wants to enter because it establishes one of the above pillars of lock-in -- it builds user expertise in their software. Any software with a different interface or behavior immediately represents a barrier to change. That retraining has a cost, that cost can have a dollar value assigned to it, and that dollar value is exactly how much Microsoft can milk you for in the future.
Microsoft's most-used mechanism to help *spread* lock-in is not contracts or dirty legal tactics, but bundling. Get one element of lock-in into play (say, file formats, with Windows binary compatibility), and use it to get Windows deployed, then try to use that to get people to use another element of Windows that can provide its own lock-in benefits. The economic potential, the amount of money that Microsoft can milk users for, increases with every increment of lock-in.
Microsoft didn't give away Internet Explorer for free because they love you and like petting kitties and giving candy to babies. They did it because (a) it builds user expertise in a feature of their software that then is difficult to move away from, increasing lock-in, (b) enough use of Internet Explorer results in network-spanning lock-in as people start dabbling in things like ActiveX, which are a big milk-producing mechanism for Microsoft, and (c) it provides another, significant, platform to use to introduce file format and protocol incompatibility, and thus further milk-producing lock-in. Internet Explorer is an *investment* in producing economic potential, lock-in, which they can cash in for loads of money over time in the future.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
... but they want to keep their customers.
A very true observation. But it's not so much about money itself anymore as it is power and control. They want the guarantee of a steady flow of money more than the money itself, and the only solution that can put that guarantee in place is the lock-in of a single vendor solution. They're willing to all but give Windows away to establish that lock-in, and that's what this agreement is designed to do.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
* Most corporations are corrupt ...
* All governments are corrupt
* Individuals are powerless when the two get together, unless they get together, too
* Resistance is not futile, but is bloody
* You will be assimilated quicker if you buy Nikes, eat at McD's, use MS products
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'm from Indonesia, even here I think only a few people buy legal, indonesian version of windows. Compared to pirated version it's still expensive. Please don't think that company over here is too poor to buy the software, they can buy $2000,- worth hardware. It's just not feasible under Indonesian business practice. It's cheaper to pay the authorities (read: corrupted police officer) than to pay microsoft. Mind you, this is one of the most corrupted goverment in the world, and the standard average salary in the goverment is very low
Work like you don't need the money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance like you do when nobody's watching