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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

>MAS (hosted on their own platform)

MAS is awesome. Anyways MS doesn't care about private piracy. They rather have you pirate Windows than leave the platform and use another OS. This is my conspiracy theory about WSL too (which is an actual nice software but still).

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Also don't forget that almost every non-Apple laptop comes with Windows pre-installed. Those OEM deals are also extremely important for Microsoft. The lost profit from people pirating Windows on self-built home PCs must be a drop in the ocean.

If Microsoft would rather have people pirate Windows than use another OS, then why did they add product activation at all?

Price discrimination

Companies using it need to pay.

Home users are whatever.

I'm pretty sure the reason for the forever upgrades since Win7 is more because it costs them less to have fewer variations of windows in the wild than to stay closer to evergreen.

Because they'd still prefer you purchase it, or maybe a later version.

In Windows 10, if you don't activate, all that happens is that it displays "Unregistered" in the corner and refuses to let you change the desktop wallpaper (and you can even get around that by rearming the "trial").

There's a few other customization items that are locked away as well. I can't recall what they are, and I finally registered by copy after years of running windows 10 and 11 unregistered so I can't even look for it. It might have had to do with graphics settings (flip presentation model?), or HDR. I think there were ways to force those options with registry edits, but that's more trouble than buying a cheap $10 windows key, which is what I finally ended up doing.

I also see lots of reports that updates other than critical/security ones may not be downloaded and applied for unregistered installs, but I'm not sure how true that is (or if it's mostly moot because I know you still get the big spring/fall patches, or at least have historically).

> There's a few other customization items that are locked away as well.

One of them is the "transparency effects" toggle, which needs to be off in VMs with VirtualBox Guest Additions installed for things to work right, and is on by default.

Make sure businesses pay?

Didn't the basic product key requirement in Windows 95 take care of that?

Not if they keep reusing the same key for multiple installs?

You can buy $10 legit keys. You can also get "free" keys from a student friend (academic license, ...)

> Kinguin's merchants acquire the codes from wholesalers who have surplus copies of Windows they don't need. "It's not a gray market. It would be like buying Adidas or Puma or Nike from a discounter, from TJ Maxx," Jordan said. "There are no legal issues with buying it from us. It's just another marketplace."

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...

> You can buy $10 legit keys

These keys may activate just fine, but they are not "legit" in any case. Most turn out to be acquired in illicit ways (MSDN licenses, ...), and a couple years ago here in Germany this led to massive amounts of criminal cases [1].

[1] https://www.borncity.com/blog/2021/03/05/betrug-mit-office-w...

Microsoft themselves says otherwise -- that this practice is not allowed, and that there is no such thing as a secondary-market product key as large customers are supposed to discard unused product keys. These $10 keys frequently get revoked as Microsoft discovers them used outside of their intended setting.

I don't know why a site that is usually reputable (tomsHardware) has gotten the facts wrong on this.

So why doesn't Microsoft sue that reseller into oblivion. It's been selling those keys for years without hiding itself.

Legal discussion:

> In the EU, software license resale is legal, even if explicitly forbidden by terms of any EULA or other contract imposed upon the parties.

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/50462/is-resale-of-w...

There's no legal issue, but the possibility of having your Windows license revoked for an EULA violation definitely falls under "not legit". And if you continue using it after it's revoked, that will be a legal issue.

It was justification for an OS that has the capability to phone home over a network, and now twenty years later we have Windows OSes that log and report everything down to the minute details of what you do in the calculator. Xbox was the same thing: justification for developing code-signature enforcement, hardware attestation, remote key revocation, etc. We would have opposed those things if they came from the world of general-purpose computing, so instead they were developed on an appliance platform where media """needs""" to be protected from the user, then it metastasized over to our computers two generations later once it was battle-tested.

Code-signature enforcement, hardware attestation, and remote key revocation aren’t inherently bad things. Like almost all technologies there are cases where they can be abused, but they can also be used to massively increase security on sensitive systems.

I develop industrial IoT gateways that are deployed to client sites, often in places which aren’t massively well secured from a physical perspective. Often an attacker could get in with a hi-vis vest and a clipboard.

Hardware attestation allows us to store encryption keys for the internal storage in a way that makes that storage useless if you remove it from the device. Signature enforcement prevents an attacker from booting their own OS on the devices and extracting keys that way (this also works alongside hardware attestation, as the TPM isn’t going to return a valid decryption key unless the expected kernel has booted). Remote key revocation allows us to terminate the device’s connection to our backend if it’s stolen.

If general purpose computers were routinely shipping with all those features turned on to ensure you could only boot a properly licensed version of Windows, and you had no access to enrol new keys, then I’d be with you, but that’s not the reality of things. If I buy a computer, either an Intel PC or an Apple desktop/laptop, I can install an OS of my choosing on it. We haven’t really lost anything here beyond the ability for people to trivially compromise computers without being detected.

Microsoft doesn’t care if josephcsible pirates Windows. Maybe he has his reasons. Maybe he can’t afford it. It’s not a major issue.

What they really want to stop is businesses selling PCs with pirated copies of windows. And that was quite common back in the Windows 95 days and is still common in some countries.

They also want josephcsible's employer to pay for Windows.

Failing that they wouldn't mind if he bought a computer with Windows preinstalled by the manufacturer, who has paid them.

I think it's the same reason why they don't care about the various KMS emulation servers for Windows 10/11 - some of these are even open source.

I've used it to quickly auth XP VMs that were needed to run ancient Navision clients. It works as advertised.

I had to whitelist the directory in Windows Security because it makes MSAV grumpy and then uploads it's grumpiness home.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s well-known that Microsoft’s “M$ <3 Linux” campaign is propaganda. It’s classic anti-competitive Microsoft behavior that started with IE in the 90s.

I think a lot of it is the writing on the wall... long term, it's software as a service model that will be their recurring revenue streams. I'm not sure what they're making in terms of just Windows licensing, but can guess that M365 is probably as much or more per year.

In the past 6-7 years most of the applications I've worked on, even those using Visual Studio, C#, etc. Have been tested/deployed on Linux more than Windows.

(Disclaimer: I work at MS, but not on WSL, opinions are my own.)

I don't see how WSL is embrace-extend-extinguish. Embrace, yes. Extend? No. There's basically nothing that only runs on WSL and not real Linux. Only QoL integrations with the Windows shell like X11/Wayland and Explorer integration. The point of WSL is backend dev. If WSL were on an EEE path, you'd expect to see MS adding Windows-only integrations, and encouraging people to run WSL server instances. Instead, MS has never positioned WSL for prod use, and instead cautions against using it for non-dev activities. Even internally, we don't use WSL to host Linux stuff. We use CBL-Mariner instead [1], which is completely FOSS.

The whole point of WSL was that Windows lost to Linux for backend. Unlike Ballmer, Satya didn't want to waste resources fighting a losing battle, so he pivoted the company towards Azure and dev tooling and away from Windows Server. And that succeeded, and it's why we're not irrelevant like IBM - we ditched our mainframes, as it were.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBL-Mariner

> There's basically nothing that only runs on WSL and not real Linux.

Not going to weigh in on the other aspects of this but I think this is untrue nowadays. Direct3D off-screen rendering and DirectML are supported in WSL2 and while there are several Direct3D implementations that run on Linux, I don't think there has been an attempt at DirectML yet, and neither are ever going to be possible using official drivers and official DirectX like you can on Windows with WSL2.

Huh. I definitely didn't know about Direct3D and DirectML support. That's bizarre, I can't imagine the use-case.

Do you remember that DirectX loves Linux announcement?

not WSL, but dotnetcore, sure, crossplatform, all is great, microsoft loves linux.. run .net applications that produces GUI? nonas, this is of course not available, thats reserved for windows.

microsoft is the same old microsoft, and people would do well to remember it

Porting GUI library is hard/impossible work.

it may be hard, but it is not impossible, no way.

so summary: microsoft being microsoft

There are cross-platform GUIs available for dot net:

https://avaloniaui.net/

thats not my point, of course someone will make that

WSL (carrot) plus UEFI Secure Boot (stick) exist to lure people who were considering switching to Linux away from running it on bare hardware, so that Microsoft can keep foisting spyware and advertising upon them.

> MS has never positioned WSL for prod use, and instead cautions against using it for non-dev activities.

Exactly, WSL is deliberately kept an inferior product so that people are discouraged from developing for Linux.

I do agree that Microsoft won't be able to extinguish Linux, especially through something like WSL, but they are attempting to retain market share for Windows desktop usage with it, and that's actually anti-Linux.

The only reason I even consider Windows as my OS these days is because of WSL, but even then I realize I still run into a lot of nonsense that is absent on Linux. One that comes to mind is how PyCharm has to whitelist project files so that Microsoft Defender doesn't scan them, and that requires a UAC prompt for every project I create. Give me a break.

How is WSL anti-competitive?

Microsoft created it to incentivize devs to stay on Windows for their dev machines instead of switching to macOS or Linux. It has no other purpose than that. As a result, that many more people are staying on Windows and Linux popularity/growth/development is somewhat more throttled than it otherwise would have been.

You could say the same thing about them eg reducing how often Windows crashes.

Making your product better ain't anti-competitive.

Yeah, I think to me the line between “competing by making our product better” and “competing in a hostile way” was crossed with WSL, because Microsoft is literally taking other people’s work and slapping it into Windows. I mean at this point I consider Windows 11 with WSL to be “Windows and Linux”, not “Windows”. It doesn’t make Windows better. To me, it’s comparable to Walmart driving small businesses out by undercutting them on price. The product isn’t better, in fact there’s plenty of “Great Value” stuff I wouldn’t feed to my dog, but nevertheless the inferior product wins out in the end. What’s good for Windows is bad for Linux, period.

Wrong. It’s classic anti-competitive Microsoft behavior that started with MS-DOS in the 80s.

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