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What happens if I never activate Windows?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
102 points (99.0% liked)
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It'll harass you to activate it indefinitely but Microsoft has a policy that they'd rather have people steal their operating system than pay for someone else's, so ultimately that's it. It'll just annoy you.
Uh... What? 99% of all alternatives to Windows are free (as in beer), whereas Microsoft is the one that charges money. Especially as a non-commercial user.
Hes half right.
Its not about paying for someone elses cause as you said the alternatives are free for the most part, its about not learning someone elses ecosystem so they stay in the windows ecosystem. Its why they have never come down on people using illegal copies.
They will come down on businesses using illegal copies. An individual with one or two or three copies running is not worth the legal expense.
Also worth saying that they can still go after individuals if they think making an example of them is needed. Our legal system is friendly to corps too.
Can, yes, but that would most likely be someone who is selling computers with unlicensed Windows installed. I'm willing to bet that the only reason Microsoft even continues to make home versions cost money is because of the deals they have with OEMs who preinstall Windows, and pay Microsoft a bit for the OS.
For example, the time I was doing field service at a small office (like seven people), because they were tired of the rando guy they were paying crazy amounts of money to. He had set them up with three or four servers he'd built himself, all of the machines in the office were unlicensed, all of the server apps (MS SQL and MS Office were the big ones I remember, but there were others) were unlicensed. He "worked remotely" "at night" and never came into their office after having put everything in place.
After the customer cut the cord with this guy, he redirected their website to somewhere else. Site was still there, but his name was on the domain registration, and he wouldn't give it back to the customer he had registered it for.
I discovered the shady state of affairs, documented and reported to my chain of command at the MSP. They must have talked to the customer because a couple of weeks later my phone rings. It's the customer -- caller ID and I recognized the voice, and it was the late aughts, so AI fakery was not on the table. The FBI was in their office, and would I talk to them? I was asked, and answered, about all of the systems and applications that I'd found which were unlicensed.
Now, I'm not saying the FBI was involved solely because of the licensing issues. I'm sure they wanted the guy for some other thing and this was their way in the door. But yeah, that was fun. And interestingly, that's not the only time I've had to talk to the FBI about "computer fuckery" tangentially related to my employment.
That is wild, did the old IT guy report them or how did the FBI come into it all? Either way I think people are sometimes too comfortable with the fact that windows is "forgiving" with activation at the moment. I would rather have a license than find out the grace period is over and I am locked out of my important stuff. I don wonder why business try and cut corners on some of this stuff. They have to know they are juicy targets for hackers and M$ lawyers.
Sorry, I wasn't clear enough - FBI was going after the old IT guy who had employed all the fuckery. I have no idea how the FBI got involved. My knowledge went from "Hey, here's what I see going on, and we're going to handle all of that" to "I am on the phone with the FBI."
i see. Still pretty wild.
Maybe the beer part is adding context that I'm missing, but MacOS is not free, as proven time and time again by them suing companies who tried using copies of install disks with license workarounds to create various Hackintoshes or iMacs modified into a tablet.
MacOS is basically a different world.
yeah, i think that helped kill a lot of other OSes early (like OS/2, Looking Glass, etc.) and still makes creating new paid ones difficult.
Most active way of harassment was changing your background with a black image. I think that was win 7
I have been running for almost a year and after first setup, didn't get a nag to activate. Just a watermark on the lower right.