China Jails Four For Microsoft XP Piracy

adeelarshad82 writes "Chinese court has jailed four people for spreading their bootleg 'Tomato Garden' version of Microsoft's Windows XP program, in what the Xinhua news agency called the nation's biggest software piracy case. One of the four men Hong Lei, the creator of the downloadable 'Tomato Garden Windows XP' software, was jailed for three and a half years by a court in Suzhou in eastern China, Xinhua."

Comments

Use Linux

[dedazo]

Seriously. I'm not one to loudly advocate using Linux on the desktop, but if it's a choice between jail and Linux... choose Linux. Use WINE if there's something you can't do without.

(I was going to make a Soviet Russia/Communist China joke here but I decided not to)

Big nothing.

[Kuano]

So let me get this straight. The largest piracy case ever in the largest country in the world with the most piracy in the world included 4 people?

Re:Because they're about to start writing software

[Zontar The Mindless]

They are in their second millennium of being a civilization.

Second millennium? More like fifth or sixth.

In lieu of a car analogy, I offer the following:

Just imagine what things would be like in Egypt if the Egyptians still wrote with hieroglyphics and worshipped at temples dedicated to Ra and company... and that the Pharaohs had been overthrown only within the last century or so.

Now substitute "China/Chinese" for "Egypt/Egyptian", "ideograms" for "hieroglyphics", "Shangdi" for "Ra and Co.", and "Chinese Emperors" for "Pharaohs".

That's China.

China is beyond "old"; it was already old when the Romans kicked out Tarquin the Proud.

Most Westerners -- especially Americans, for whom "ancient" means "more than 250 years ago" -- simply do not get this.