Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

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in india, piracy is not seen as bad unless its some bigshot movie star who calls it a "heinous crime" that a user enjoys their movies and they arent getting paid. anyways, i have never paid for a windows license. maybe back in 98 days but never after that. we use cracks and it used to be sold for a dollar or less. get an iso, copy iso, copy crack and thats it.

people here have a problem accepting foss because they see windows as free so what benefit is switching to ubuntu?

about media. until few years ago, you could only watch movies in theaters or on cable tv. shops would resell torrented movies for few cents a pop because that is at most what people were willing to pay. i am not going to buy an original DVD 6 months after launch for $ 30 if i get screener for $0.2 dollars next day of launch.

its not about "robbing" the company, often purchasing parity means $10 is a days manual labour wages. paying $99 for a windows license used to make no sense when they already paid not more than $200-300 for an entire setup or a laptop.

In those days Microsoft had a "curious" business strategy. They wanted Windows to be the dominant standard whilst trying to avoid monopoly litigation. So they'd charge everyone a license fee knowing that standard businesses would pay up, and those that wouldn't or couldn't were allowed to crack the software and use it. That portion of the market, the "piracy" sector wasn't in their view part of their market share numbers (they would say they weren't a monopoly). But having this in place meant it was harder for competitors to sub-divide the market into other Operating Systems and Enterprise productivity software. So it would end up as either Open Source or Windows. This is why they didn't reduce their prices for purchasing power parity purposes (to make it equally affordable in each market). The rich countries could drive their profits, and everyone else had a "free" ride just to shut the door on a competitor.

Of course, the history of Microsoft and Anti-trust litigation is well documented. Things didn't entirely work out for them.

Every computer I bought had a windies license fee tacked on wether I used their operating system, or not.

To this day, I try not to give Microsoft any money.

I have never really cared for Gates, nor his nonprofit that gives less than 1 percent back to the country that allowed him to flourish.

> nor his nonprofit that gives less than 1 percent back to the country that allowed him to flourish.

Do I understand you correctly, that your objection to the Gates foundation is, that they don‘t spend on projects in the US?

Im gonna go out on a limb and say that, yes, that is their objection. Does that surprise you, or do you find it objectionable? Why? Im legitimately curious.

The Gates Foundation has done a lot to save lives and reduce suffering in developing countries. It's a bit tone-deaf to knock him on that point, and also pretty myopic. The US does not exist in a vacuum, and having third world countries develop faster because they're not getting hammered by easily preventable diseases actually can benefit the US. The people who are alive today (or maybe their descendants) might be buying products and services from the US down the road.

Why would you choose to save lives and reduce suffering in a far off land when you could save lives and reduce suffering for your own country? That is what I have never understood about foreign aid charities.

Simple: The US is the wealthiest country in the history of the world and we don't have a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of easily preventable/treatable diseases.

Range of possible reasons -

Maybe because issues in poor nations are straightforward to solve: if you resolve the issue with clean water for a village, that improves lives of hundreds. Issues that plague 'The west' don't have a known solution.

Maybe because of most issues in poorest nations is lack of funs / tech, which he can provide, but cause of suffering in western world is usually political or mismanagement, which he cannot 'provide'

Maybe because for the same resources deployed the choice is between saving 100 kids from disease in Africa vs helping social mobility of 1 kids in US

Maybe you do not believe that from Alaska to Hawaii is 5,000 miles of "we", but 500 miles South from Texas it's "they". Nation-centric worldview is a relatively new idea that only existed for a couple hundred years, even today many people associate by faith, by town/province, by ethnicity or other things over nationality

Most fundamentally, a lot of us are humanists, not nationalists.

But more narrowly: Gates Foundation focuses on straightforwardly preventable diseases. These are diseases of extreme poverty that are nearly or entirely absent in the US. The US's problems are of a different nature, largely stemming from inequality in access to healthcare which is a political problem.

It seems rather ghoulish to look at one of the most effective charities in the world, that has no doubt had an impact on millions of people, and say "I want those $$ to stay in the US instead" when we are the most wealthy and powerful nation in history. We need to fix our own political issues, not shame Gates for doing truly good things elsewhere. You want to help the US? Vote for people who want to help the most vulnerable among us vs the most powerful. Our government and society has the resources, they are simply being directed with deliberate inequities.

$4 in burkina faso will protect a family of 4 from malaria

$4 in america will buy a latte.

Because there are more lives to save and suffering to reduce in that far off land than in your own country, perhaps?

Are you, say, a man? Then why would you give anything to a charity that helps women? (Or vice versa.) Or are you perhaps white? Then why would you give anything to a charity that helps people of colour? (Or vice versa.) Etc, etc... Get the point yet? If not, I'll spell it out for you: "Charity" that only benefits copies of yourself isn't really charity.

A lot, as long as it respects Western intellectual property "rights."

Like persuading Oxford University to NOT give away the rights to its COVID-19 vaccine: https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...

This is what I really don't understand and must assume ulterior motives. His altruistic intentions of trying to eradicate horrible diseases in 3rd world countries is highly commendable, yet this type of move will only allow new Covid-* variants to gain traction, therefore requiring new vaccines sooner than later. I definitely am not looking forward to a never-ending pandemic.

Does anyone know if he holds shares in vaccine producing companies?

> Does anyone know if he holds shares in vaccine producing companies?

What would the angle be here? Gates is in the process of trying to give away all least half of his money to charity. His net worth is ~125 billion, is making another billion or two really going to motivate him at this stage in his life?

That's a good question, hence my confusion. Perhaps it's merely a political move and he's doesn't want to upset the wrong people?

On the other hand, I've heard that anyone with that much wealth is operating on a completely different mental model than the rest of us. I can only assume he has a very high-level overview of any global aspects that he is interested in and therefore has completely different goals. I suppose that I can't even begin to fathom his thought process and perhaps my confusion is completely unfounded, I just wish I knew the reasoning for his recent Covid-vaccine decisions, which seemingly are detrimental to all human beings on a global scale.

I honestly think that centralizing the production is the best way to produce the most vaccine in the shortest amount of time. Giving out the IP around the vaccine wouldn't just immediately bring more production online, and the IP alone isn't a sufficient recipe for producing more vaccines in bulk. What could instead happen is a bunch of players across the globe try to jump-start production and start bidding up the prices of the inputs, making production more costly and thus reducing production. Beyond that, quality control could suffer in the hands of inexperienced producers, and so more vaccine could be wasted.

It's been a weird thing for people to turn on Gates and assume he has some diabolical angle. He was an absolute savage in business, and people rightfully feared/hated him when he was at the helm of Microsoft (I was in college during the MS antitrust trial, and a lot of the CS department was rooting for them to be taken down). What I think motivates him now is straightforward self-actualization, trying to undo some of the fairly justified animosity he earned in business for the sake of his legacy. All the money in the world can't buy you a legacy, only accomplishments can do that, and that's what I think he's chasing now.

I've heard that argument, but IP rights are really a red herring - the bottlenecks on production are in material inputs and manufacturing. Waivers on IP rights could actually have the opposite effect we want by creating pointless competition when what is needed is centralization and economies of scale to maximize output.

Is there any reason to think the money he made and is now giving away came mainly from the US? AFAICT there are a lot more users of Microsoft software outside the USA than within them. With that in mind: Yes, it seems rather ludicrous to demand that he use it for charity exclusively there.

Another reason being that the US is one of the richest countries in the world -- and therefore, logically, among the least in need of charity. (BTW, this shows the objection is ridiculous even if his fortune came mainly from the USA: If he had made his money from selling some luxury article, say Rolls-Royce cars or something, and then decided to spend the money so earned on charity -- should he have been expected to spend it only on helping the kind of people who buy Rolls-Royces?)

Both screamingly obvious reasons IMO, so I find it somewhat surprising that anyone needed to be curious about this.

In those days?

Right now it's even easier. You don't even have to crack it, just select "I'll do this later" when you have to fill in your license code.

€3 keys off eBay work perfectly fine and are legal since reselling OEM software has been explicitly ruled to be legal several times in EU courts now.

I've read that these cheap OEM licenses could be cancelled after some time. Dunno if true or not. Could you give a link for EU courts' rulings?

I believe it’s this ruling in a case involving Oracle: https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=12...

The ruling was appeal and a 2016 ruling in a higher court just confirmed that you can in fact resell software licenses.

But isn't it a different license like consumer vs business? I mean when OEMs are used for pre-built PCs or when it's activated by end user.

I know of a case where payment got cancelled: eBay found the seller fraudulent and refunded either out of pocket or from insurance, probably the latter.

That said, sometimes the licenses can indeed get cancelled. I’ve seen a really sketchy looking photocopied label that a guy “got” that didn’t work. Depends on the channel perhaps.

In the 90s and early 00s, the pirated software was like weed. If police didn't find anything on you, they'll get your computer and charge you with piracy. That time everyone had something, Windows or Norton Commander etc. I read about people having counted each file as a separate charge, to make them look like big fish. There were instances they counted expired trials too...

It's interesting how Windows went from "worth pirating" to "don't want even if the upgrade is free" for me --- the user- hostile attitude MS has started to adopt has been a huge turn-off.

> "people here have a problem accepting foss because they see windows as free so what benefit is switching to ubuntu?"

Because even if they gave you Windows free of cost, Windows has never been free as in freedom, and probably never will be. That's the thing people seem unable to wrap their brains around about FOSS is that it's about freedom, not cost. The fact that it's also cost-free is just added bonus that nobody in their right mind should complain about.

How many times have you altered Firefox, though? Or Chromium? Or GIMP? Or any other large software project?

Free as in freedom doesn't mean shit when codebases are so large as to be inscrutable and induplicable.

Meanwhile, people have been patching and modding Windows despite the lack of source code.

While I myself have only modified smaller codebases, modified forks of Firefox, Chromium, and GIMP (among many others) do in fact exist. Some of those forks have even gone on to become quite popular (although none yet as popular as their parent codebases).

LPT: go to ebay, search for windows license. You can get one for 3-4$ or so. You can even find dedicated sites that sells cheap licenses of Windows or Office.

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