A recent crack-down on piracy in Kenya has driven a number of internet cafes to open source.

A frequent meme in piracy trash talking is that piracy is linked to malware (example). If your child is downloading pirated material (so the argument goes) they will be downloading it from a malware infected site and infecting their own computer resulting in poor performance, data loss and ID theft. A variant of this argument is that the downloads expose the kids to evil pornographers.

Today I was reading about the “Reduced Functionality” capability of Windows Vista. According to that article, Microsoft has now enabled this capability, which renders a “nongenuine” copy of Windows essentially unusable.

Let's analyse the situation:

You wanna leave Windows for some reason:
* You wanna reduce costs for your business?
* You don't like MS's "anti-piracy" measures?
* You're just sick of the cycle of spending money on a new system when your existing one is fine?
* Maybe, just maybe, you do NOT want to be tied to Microsoft any longer?
* ("Insert your own reason")

Microsoft is doing away with “reduced functionality mode” for individuals that its WGA activation and validation scheme deems to be running “non-genuine” software. The company also is plugging two WGA loopholes that pirates have been exploiting successfully.

Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures.

When Sam Ramji, Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, describes his company's open source strategy, I believe him. Every word.

Recently there have been numerous discussions on software and media piracy, with a few people even saying that open source could be the solution to stopping software piracy... However, software piracy is one of open source's biggest enemies, and few people realize that.

Mistakes happen. But when software publishers make mistakes with their anti-piracy programs, it always seems to be the users who pay the price. That's certainly been the case with Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program throughout its less-than-illustrious history, and now a new pilot program for Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) Notifications nagware has started off on the wrong foot.