Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Give All Your Software Away to Pirates For Free!

Give All Your Software Away to Pirates For Free!

Microsoft’s decision to give Windows 10 away to pirates for free is absolute genius. It’s such a simple, ludicrous plan and it’s going to work. It’s just, “you can’t pirate our software if we give it to you for free.” That’s it! Brilliant!

Many of you probably think I am trolling you at this point. After all, if you give something away for free, you won’t make any profit on it, right? But that’s the thing. The people who were pirating Windows 10 weren’t going to make Microsoft any profit anyway. So giving them a free copy of Windows 10 doesn’t impact the company’s bottom line at all.

Doesn’t this somehow harm the people who will purchase it legitimately? Nope! You see, the free Windows 10 upgrade is being given to anyone who has a copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8 and wants to upgrade in the first 12 months following Windows 10’s release. These copies can be completely illegitimate and pirated, hence the free copies given away to pirates, but they are also free for anyone who purchased the OS legitimately as well. So basically, no one is paying for this upgrade.

So why is this genius? Simple. A lot of the piracy of any piece of software occurs within the first few months of its release. It’s because the temptation of the new and shiny is too great to be turned down. Basically, all the pirates that would be pirating Windows 10 are just going to be given a legitimate copy instead. Anyone who would go about hacking the operating system is just going to get the new operating system free of charge. Thus, when the 12 month period is up and new people are building new computers and want to pirate Windows 10 as their operating system, no one will have cracked it, because no one will have had the motivation to. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it will never be cracked, but it will effectively push back cracking efforts.

It also effectively takes these hackers completely out of the Windows hacking loop. How? Simple. Their new copy of Windows 10 will have its own legitimate CD key. So say that they need to transfer it to another system, or upgrade to Windows 11 or whatever new OS they make. They can now do this legitimately, and that’s way easier than hacking the OS. Microsoft has basically given them what they want, which prevents any low level pirates who only know how to download and install from getting what they want.

Give All Your Software Away to Pirates For Free!

It’s brilliant. It’s simply brilliant, and frankly it’s probably the model we should follow in the future. Not only does this prevent the OS from being cracked, or at least slow it down, it also saves Microsoft a whole lot of money on a lot of useless DRM. If Microsoft is looking to chase maximum profit and security, this is exactly what they should do.

So give away your most expensive software to pirates and watch your profits balloon.

To top