Once upon a time I wouldn’t have known legal software if it came in a shiny box with a license stuck to it. Oh yeah, thats right, it did, didn’t it.
Fast forward 20 years and lo and behold I am now an IT Pro making my living fixing PC’s and supporting users. I own my own business so the legalities of the software we use has a direct impact on me personally, therefore we only use legal copies on the PC’s we build and only ever install legal applications.
Thing is we seem to be in a minority, maybe its only geographically but nonetheless the majority of systems we get in for repair have at least a cracked copy of office if not the whole OS. While its hard to convince users that part of their problems could well come from the dodgy copy of XP Pro their buddy installed over their perfect legit Dell XPHome and btw he destroyed your recovery partition while he was at it, its even harder to justify the single most expensive component of the average PC (the OS) when the chances of them getting caught is so low.
So my question to you all is how do you feel about this? I seem to have gone from renegade bandit to fanatic establishmentarianism (or somthing that a word like that if there were one would seem to imply).
If pirating is theft then so is illegal software. If illegal software is theft then the stolen goods is the Operating System or Application. If these items are stolen goods then perpetrators should be charged accordingly, no matter how big or small. Likewise, to knowingly repair such a system is akin to handling stolen goods, something I believe is a crime in itself.
Is it about time that illegal software was targetted and discussed in these terms?
Is it time for Microsoft to reward those who report illegal software and punish those who sell it, no matter how small they are?
Surely if it was then the cowboys out there to make a quick buck might think twice.