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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."
yeah because it is almost everyday that a large software vendor aims to reduce someone's level of suffering by not collecting any $$ on their product.
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....
The kew word is potentially. In reality it does squat, period. The governments can always find other pretexts to raid NGOs. There are other software companies, not just MS, products of which could be pirated too.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
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
Well, what else would you expect them to do? Recently, Russia was raiding the offices of politically undesirable organizations using software piracy as an excuse, and Microsoft lawyers were involved. Microsoft had stopped agreeing to press charges once it became obvious that the government was just using them as an excuse. Now, they're going ever further than they already had and being explicit about who they are giving licenses to.
Just because it doesn't cost them anything doesn't mean it isn't still worth something. And providing free licenses is a big step up from not prosecuting pirates. They'll be able to get software updates and security patches, which will cut down on the amount of out-of-date, exploitable software out there to become part of spam bots, which is good for everyone.
If anything we now know that Microsoft was a little deceptive when they previously said they were creating a blanket license, clearly it's based on territory and limited in scope. That's not to say its a bad thing, but certainly not what was originally sold.
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......
Linux should really do this too. Oh, wait..
http://www.goehner.com/piracyru.htm
First paragraph:
In Russia alone, with an estimated 94% software piracy rate...
Ok...so I was off by one percentage point.
http://www.chinatechnews.com/2009/05/14/9758-bsa-software-piracy-rate-down-to-80-in-china
So China is down to 80%, according to the BSA. Not that I trust their figures, but anyway...according to the same article,
there are seven countries where the software piracy rate is still over 90%, including Georgia, Bangladesh, Armenia, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan, and Moldova.
Now we look at the list of countries MS is providing free software to, according to the article:
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — as well as China, Malaysia and Vietnam.
At least a couple of countries appear in both lists. So a good portion of these countries are over 90% piracy. Maybe not all of them, but a significant amount.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
"To you, maybe, but Microsoft could bankrupt itself inventing a machine that causes piles of food to appear in every village in Africa at the push of a button, and it wouldn't come across as philanthropic to Slashdot."
Hey, the guy or girl you're replying to does not speak for slashdot. Neither do I, just to set the record straight.
I don't like MS. I don't like their business practices. I don't like their efforts to frame things like .Net as cross platform. I don't like them when they're actively trying to screw things up for the FOSS world, and I don't like them when they're pretending to be friends. I have mixed feelings about their OS and office products and I try not to spend too much time using either.
All that said, well done Microsoft for this move. This is a good thing. It's perhaps not going to stop bad governments raiding some of these NGOs, but it does remove one more way they could try and cover it up and pretend it was reasonable.
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'.
wow, that's harsh.
it would be far less cruel to just leave them to the tender mercies of the secret police and torture squads.
Now maybe they meant only Russia but it doesn't take much to read that statement as applying globally. An ambiguity I'm sure they didn't mind.
There's a huge difference between a statement that's easy to misinterpret, and deliberately misinterpreting a statement.
I hate to tell you this, but itworld.com is not an official Microsoft outlet. What Microsoft actually said was:
One challenge, however, is that some NGOs in a number of countries, including Russia, are unaware of our program or do not know how to navigate its logistical processes, which involves ordering the donated software through a Microsoft partner. We'll solve this problem by providing a unilateral NGO Software License that runs automatically from Microsoft to NGOs and covers the software already installed on their PCs. We'll make this new, non-transferable license applicable to NGOs in a number of countries, including in Russia.
So they started in a few (mostly unnamed) countries and now they have expanded it.
For anyone who wants to see the link without being prompted to register to nytimes.com:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/world/17russia.html
Hmm, but the source would still be closed after the mass suicide? Not good enough I'm afraid.
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
I agree that the principle is bad. Apart from the lack of information in the link name, it doubles the number of servers involved and will break the way back machine. However, in the particular case of tinyurl it's worth knowing that if you go to their homepage you can set things so that you see the URL before visiting it.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
What should they do exactly?
> America sucks. Where's my free copy of Office 2010?
Since the hate crime you committed against America is kind of grave, the free copy of Office 2010 is an insufficient punishment, I suggest they give you also free office 2007 and 2003 plus sources and the full ooxml specs.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
So, because Microsoft can't stop all potential human rights abuses, they should just do nothing?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it