I’ve dealt a lot with software piracy issues, primarily with Project Badger (detecting and preventing piracy is one of its primary purposes). And I didn’t have to learn the hard way that you have to be very careful before calling any user a pirate, or allowing your software to do so — paying customers don’t like being accused of theft. If there’s any chance at all that you could be wrong about it, you have to give the customer the benefit of the doubt.
For some reason, Microsoft did have to learn that the hard way. Their first antipiracy attempt, three or four years ago, was secretly installed onto systems disguised as an “important security update.” And it “caught” far too many of their legitimate, paying customers, baldly and unapologetically calling them thieves. It was clumsy and heavy-handed, too — it essentially made the system unusable until the “caught” person called Microsoft to correct the problem. Even if you didn’t experience it yourself, it’s easy to see how that could royally piss people off.
But by the sound of it, they’ve fixed all of those problems. They’re going out of their way to be open and honest about the process now; the false-detection problems seem to be fixed; and when it does think that it has caught someone, it allows the system to continue working as normal, simply informing the user of the problem.
I still don’t particularly like Windows, but it’s easier to deal with it now.
Hmm, do you think they’ll get rid of the DRM copy protection altogether, like OS X, which never had it and probably never will? 🙂 (Of course, it has another type of copy protection, it’s meant to only run on certain types of computers, to be fair. Though as you know, that particular protection is broken rather easily.)
Windows essentially didn’t have any copy protection until 2006. There was just the serial number you had to enter, and that was easy to get around, there were lists of them posted all over the ‘net. In an uncharacteristically smart move, Microsoft put off copy protection as long as they could, and longer than their investors might wish.
OS X can get away with having no copy protection right now, because Apple isn’t the de facto standard operating system. I can practically guarantee that they’ll add it eventually, though I don’t see it happening in the next five years (which is as far as I’m willing to prognosticate).
Good prognostication, because five years from now, it might be called OS XI, not OS X. 😉 Either that, or it will be only the iPhone/iPad developer’s-workstation OS, even if not in name, by then. It’s clear that that’s the future of Apple, if they can manage to sell enough iPads.