Slashdot Mirror
India Presses Microsoft For Windows Discount in Wake of Cyber Attacks (reuters.com)
India is pressing Microsoft to offer a sharply discounted one-time deal to the more than 50 million Windows users in the country so that they can upgrade to the latest Windows 10 operating system in the wake of ransomware attacks, Reuters reported Friday. From the article: Microsoft officials in India have "in principle agreed" to the request, Gulshan Rai, India's cyber security coordinator, told Reuters over the phone on Friday. If Microsoft agreed to such a discount, it could open up the global software giant to similar requests from around the world. Rai said the government was in talks with Microsoft management in India. It is not immediately clear whether any other countries were seeking similar deals.
India has had EVERY opportunity to get off of Microsoft's garbage platform. Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now. But instead, they chose to steal and pirate Microsoft's proprietary software, and now they want a bail-out. This makes me sick. Fuck Gulshan Rai and all of the asshole Indians who refuse to switch to Free and open source software. People have worked damn hard to create these alternatives to proprietary software—often the reasoning being that it is more accessible to those in the third-world—yet it's easier for them to simply steal. India deserves all of the ransomware it gets. Pricks.
You say that as a joke, but MS really doesn't mind that much.
Of course they'd prefer if you pay, but if you refuse to do that then their 2nd choice is that you pirate their software rather than using somebody else'. If they're not getting money from you either way, then they may as well at least get the vendor lock-in and other such intangible benefits.
And these days especially, they would MUCH rather you use a free (whether pirated or given) version of Win10 than previous versions of Windows. Again, they aren't getting money either way so the intangible benefits are more critical. Particularly the fact that they can issue security patches and try to reign in some of the bad press they always get that isn't really their fault. Of course they also (rightfully) get plenty of bad press for things that are their fault, but its pretty hard to blame them for getting hacked if you're using a 15 year old OS (and they're apparently still able and willing to issue patches for XP when things get really really bad as we've see over the past few weeks.)