If china boast about its high reserve rates and it being a superpower then it should act accordingly and stop the hypocrisy

@GrahamPhisher – You got me laughing; how true! So many othervise savvy computer users in China, yet how come I met so many of them who failed to take even basic precautions against viruses, etc. A miracle that their computers kept working at all!

OK, I already said piracy wass not on, in principle. I also said that Microsoft was no ordinary victim. Its wealth and market domination does not, primarily, come from innovation, but from their business strategies. They charge for their product on the basis of “what the market will bear”. In China, they tolerated piracy because there was nothing they could do about it, anyway.

Now they think they got the Chinese users hooked to the point where they can MAKE them pay, or else! I do not pretend to know what will happen next, but obviously Chinese would have to put up with it. Or look for alternatives, thus exerting pressure on MS to change its ways. That’s where other OSs come in. They do not need to “win”; just dent MS’s hegemony enough for it to come back down to earth, and actually compete.

If this is panic to you, well good luck in this world, and take a chillax pill.

that’s all that’s required.

Linux has decent, but imperfect hardware support. It is developed by the community, and does not always have full time programmers for its support. It’s not free because the developers don’t value their time, it’s free because they want more people to work on it, and the only way to do that is to give everyone full view of the source code.

Software Piracy is called Piracy for a reason. You are stealing something because it is easily stolen, not because you need it to survive. There are even legitimate free alternitives, yet you choose to steal anyhow. Any justification of piracy is just a lie you tell yourself to make you feel better about the theft.

As for the “unfairness of setting the same price in China and in US”, let’s not forget that MS product is grossly overpriced everywhere, IMO.

And we need not wait for Linux to win for things to improve; as Linux gets strong enough to hurt their bottom line, you’ll see MS changing their ways, too!

On one hand, I do not like Microsoft and their strategies in general, but on the other hand, I never much liked the argument that “if I cannot afford it, I should be able to have it for free.”

Thankfully for the Chinese, western users have struggled with this for years, and as a result, linux is a perfectly viable alternative, more difficult to use, but free.

As for the unfairness of setting the same price in China and in US, China is not a poor country anymore, and does not need economic help from Microsoft. China’s economy is arguably benefiting a lot from the fact life is cheaper there than in US… However, there are disadvantages, and this is one of them.