Micro$oft gets tough on pirates

Is your O/S and office software legal?

According to figures published by Microsoft, 35% of the software in the world is thought to be counterfeit or otherwise illegal. After years of unofficially tolerating piracy as a means of securing market share, Microsoft is now going on the offensive to make sure copies of its software are legit.

The software giant says it’s gunning for people who are running unlicensed copies of Windows and Office, but won’t deprive them of critical fixes.

Microsoft are turning up the heat on unlicensed software with the announcement of the full roll-out of Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), and extension of the Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) roll-out to the UK.

It has also just bought Canadian asset-tracking company AssetMetrix, specialising in detecting what software is installed on PCs.

Around the world, the Business Software Alliance is setting up schemes to prosecute offenders - for example, in the UK it is offering large cash rewards to anyone who informs against organisations.

Microsoft itself admits customers find it difficult to navigate the complexities of software licensing - it’s easy to break the rules by mistake. If you have a copy of MS-Office at work, at school, at home - are you sure where it came from?

WGA has been running in some countries for some time, but this did not include the UK, the US, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia. Customers in those countries must now decide to opt in to the scheme or risk losing support and updates.

But Microsoft is playing down any action it may take against users who refuse to sign up to the scheme and insists that it will continue to support all users.

“When someone signs up with Windows Genuine Advantage, we can check out their software and we can see if they are running a copy of Windows that is not genuine,” Michala Alexander, Microsoft’s UK head of anti-piracy programmes, told ZDNet UK.

“If that happens, the customer gets three options. They can get the software properly licensed, they can get help in dealing with the issue, or they can decide to do nothing for the time being.”

If an issue is raised and the user does not deal with it, then Microsoft will send out “a gentle reminder” said Alexander. The aim, she said, is to reassure customers that their software is genuine.

Fortunately for those users who fall into this latter category, as far as office software goes there is a completely legal and free alternative. OpenOffice.org 2 is a fully-featured office suite, similar in functionality to MS-Office.

It performs all the basic functionality you would expect to find in an office productivity suite including: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and much more. It can use MS-Office format files (.doc, .xls, .ppt), so you don’t need to re-key your work, and even let you create and distribute .pdf files.

In another recent Open Source development, Sun Microsystems have said they will release the source code of more of its applications built on Java, including its portal and integration software, although they have stopped short of releasing the source code for Java itself.

Sun have also said that they will discuss the Java Distribution License, which makes it easier to bundle the desktop Java Runtime Environment with Linux.

Maybe we are actually moving into a new era of computing, where there will be a re-balancing of the scales away from Microsoft thanks to the Open Source distribution model.

Lets hope so.

Sources: CNET News.com, ZDNet UK, OpenOffice.org, SatelliteHelp.co.uk

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