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MS Gives Free Licenses To Oppressed Nonprofits
victorl19 writes "Microsoft is vastly expanding its efforts to prevent governments from using software piracy inquiries as a pretext to suppress dissent. It plans to provide free software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China."
So basically, they're taking a bunch of organizations in countries that probably have a 95% or higher piracy rate, and giving them free licenses.
So it's costing Microsoft essentially squat, but potentially improves human rights in said countries.
Commendable, but not exactly as philanthropic as MS probably wants to come across as....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Microsoft fundamentally believes there are some who will never pay for the software. Crackdown too hard on them or be too successful in preventing piracy, they might defect to Linux and open free software. So it did not try too hard to fight piracy. But the dissenters in oppressed countries might better served by specific hardened distros from Linux camp than by the free offerings from Microsoft. You never know if it has shown the source code to these governments or allowed them to install back doors.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft, in its recent press efforts, has shown it is very concerned about free and open software. So now Microsoft is trying to disguise itself as a free and open software vendor. A crack dealer will give away free samples to obtain and retain a customer......
Think again. Not doing it would a public relations disaster of epic proportions. As it stands it's an averted one. A narrowly averted public relations disaster.
The fact that they had to be told in the first place means they were well behind the curve -- as usual. I mean, seriously, they're the biggest software corp on earth, every resource you can think of. Think of what they didn't manage: A laid-back press conference saying they'd noticed years ago and quietly gave everyone they could think of a refund and free licenses. It's something you give your anti-piracy lawyers discretion to do, and hope to keep it quiet because of the abuse inherently possible with that, not something you want to have the nytimes splash all over the front page, forcing you to make an equally grand gesture to convince everyone you're not that evil.
FTFA: “We clearly have a very strong interest in ensuring that any antipiracy activities are being done for the purpose of reducing illegal piracy, and not for other purposes,” they say now, but that isn't what they always said: “Microsoft had long rejected requests from human-rights groups that it refrain from taking part in such cases, saying it was merely complying with Russian law.”
It's damage control, is what it is.
Not a repost. They seem to want to escape PR of this http://tinyurl.com/2usjw6p [yhrm.org] has a link to a letter sent back ~April 15 2010.
They could end up being accused of interfering in internal politics of another country by subsidising dissident groups.
No good way out of this really.
Previously the "blanket" license applied in Russia. They're adding it to more countries.
That's not deceptive. That's you calling it deceptive.
The Russian government treats copyright law as a criminal, as opposed to civil matter. The Russians would ask Microsoft if they were all licensed up, and Microsoft's people in the area were saying "no", probably because they didn't have enough pull to say "yes" within Microsoft.
It's typical bureaucracy. When the negative PR reached Redmond, they were like, "Whaaaaaa?" and responded by saying all NGOs in Russia are licensed, period.
Microsoft is now expanding the program in other countries where they suspect similar tactics may be used. How shameful.
What the Russian gov't is doing to the political opposition is criminal. Odds are that M$'s motives aren't pure as I'm sure someone, if not the originator of the idea, knew M$ would get good PR in the West for their actions. If one grants that their ulterior motives are impure it only underscores the beauty of what M$ is doing: Giving the Russian gov't a dose of their own medicine. What M$ is doing is along the same lines as Russia in that they are both doing something that they know will get good PR in the West but with 'hidden' self-serving ulterior motives. Russia deserves a dose of its own medicine. Kudos to M$ for poking the Russian gov't in the eye, even if M$ gets some benefit from it!
To those who point out the possibility/fact that Russia will just find some other pretext to appear to be legally cracking down on the Oligarchy's enemies, this doesn't mean that simply rolling over and giving up because that could/will happen is the correct course of action. If the opposition does that, then Russia will just continue to be the frakked up entity it has been since at least the time of Kievan Rus'.
This is ridiculous. I thought Slashdot was finally over this kind of thing?
I'm sorry man, I lost you after the third dollar sign. No one will take your arguments seriously like this, anymore than anyone would take someone obviously biased against FOSS repeatedly using terms like "linsux" or "open sores".
There's a huge difference between a statement that's easy to misinterpret, and deliberately misinterpreting a statement.
Please don't use URL shortners. Im not gonna click that link, and a good portion of other people are not going to click that link. The information you were trying to spread is not being spread.
You take what very well may be an informative post, and relegated it to possibly being a trollish goatse post. It would be like taking a samsung dvd player and rebranding it as a $generic_brand. No one is gonna buy it, we all think its no good. No one is gonna click your link because it looks like $generic_goatse
What should they do exactly?