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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has largely stopped giving a fuck about piracy of their consumer products.

py-kms is freely available on GitHub, and so are Windows Activation Tools.

While arguably py-kms doesn’t violate anything, as it’s a cleanroom implementation of the KMS server, Windows Activation Tools definitely does.

Either way, MS could eradicate all of those repositories, they aren’t doing it.

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MS has done a good thing by defending youtube-dl but their lax enforcement concerning windows piracy is a bit different. MS turns a blind eye to windows piracy for the same reasons malware authors don't care if their software is spread on GitHub or P2P sites.

Microsoft cares much more about getting their hands on all your personal data than they care about the money they'd get from an OEM license. People can download an ISO for Windows 11 for free from microsoft.com and simply never activate it.

I don't think so. I think the real reason is that a pirated Windows install is not Mac or Linux, and will probably, eventually, become a legal Windows install.

Imagine telling a bunch of possibly talented and/or ambitious poor people that they should use another (better) operating system. Instead, let them become Windows experts and ultimately make Microsoft more money.

indeed, even if never a valid purchase, still a valuable datapoint for 99% of those "non tech savvy didnt block all the telemetry domains in their personal pihole, but managed to activated w massgrave" crowd

It's also because MS makes way, way, way more money on business licenses than they do on individual consumer ones. They don't have much incentive to care about individuals not giving them a sale. Meanwhile, businesses are actively audited if they're suspected of violating license agreements.

It is remarkable how easy they've made it to cleanly pirate Windows recently. You don't even need to run your own KMS thing, there are several public servers, and you just type in three terminal commands.

Totally different from the Vista/7/8 era where activation required real cracking software. It's an explicit signal that they don't really care about consumer licensing.

The rise of SaaS has made piracy much less of a threat to revenue. Can’t pirate it if you need a server to do anything.

Youtube didn't care about piracy and copyright at all either. In their audience growth phase.

> Either way, MS could eradicate all of those repositories, they aren’t doing it.

yet

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