Nothing compared to pirated CDs with Office and Windows, 20 yrs back.

They don't care, they would rather let you use pirated MS software than move to Linux. There is a repo on GH with powershell scripts for activating windows/office and they let it sit there. Just checked, repo has 165K stars.

This could be the same, they know devs mostly prefer to use cursor and/or claude than copilot.

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anonymars 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What's the direct cost to Microsoft of someone pirating an OS vs. making requests to a hosted LLM?

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CamperBob2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They don't care, they would rather let you use pirated MS software than move to Linux.

Not even sure that's true anymore. How else to explain WSL/WSL2? They practically lead you to Linux by the hand these days.

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userbinator 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Even with that, your hardware is still running Windows.

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CamperBob2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But it's an easy jump to the real thing from there.

	▲	userbinator an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The driver issues that are commonly complained about will make that difficulty depend on what hardware you have.

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jlarocco 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Home users are icing on the cake. Suing them for privacy is a bad look (see the RIAA), and using Windows and Office at home reinforces using at work.

On the other hand, since they own GitHub they can (in theory) monitor the downloads, check for IPs belonging to businesses, and use it as evidence in piracy cases.