É o que pergunta David Berlind, em blog da ZDNet. Tudo gira em torno da nova diretiva da MS, que vetará atualizações de cópias não oficiais do Windows. No quente 'talkback' há a seguinte consideração:

Think about this....you have 100 million legal copies of XP, and 10 million illegal copies of XP. Those 10 million are exploited to launch a zombie attack to flood the Internet with DOS attacks, spam attacks, and Lord knows what else. Yes, the 100 million legal copies may not be impacted directly, but what about the traffic that overloads the legal servers for e-commerce and business?

You're not thinking outside the box on this decision, and besides that Gates is a total hypocrite in his original statement:

"We haven't explicitly done anything to SP2 to exclude it from pirated copies....It was a tough choice, but we finally decided that even if someone has a pirated copy of Windows, it is more important to keep him safe than it is to be concerned about the revenue issue.....Having these unsecured users means bigger worm and virus outbreaks - which also impacts the Internet and consequently, our legitimate users as well."



Pq a MS mudou a postura? "Bigger worm and virus outbreaks" não são mais uma ameaça? Berlind tem um palpite:

But, between the free versions of desktop Linux that are getting better and better, companies like Sun and Novell who are offering complete desktop productivity solutions (operating system, applications, etc.) for $50 per year, Microsoft offering dirt cheap versions of Windows in other parts of the world, a significant delay to the future and very different generation of Windows, and what appears to be a lot of upgrade resistance (suggesting no signficant increase in utility from one version to the next), you can't help but wonder if the Windows dynasty has finally run out of gas (and, if--by scraping the bottom of the barrell--Microsoft knows it).