Since I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for about 15 years, and my entire professional career has been managing Linux and UNIX systems, I haven't really thought much about Microsoft and their licensing policies or anti-piracy practices...but, we recently had a customer demand an online printable "Certificate of Authenticity" for our software, and pointed to the Microsoft digital certificate of authenticity as the ideal example of such. His organization requires all software used to have such a certificate.
The truly nefarious aspect of this weird policy (which seems to exist, in lesser forms in other places, based on demands we've had for various specific bits of information on invoices) is that Open Source software is completely out of the running in the organizations that embrace such a policy. In our case, Virtualmin is an umbrella under which a couple dozen Open Source apps run, so I guess having the certificate for Virtualmin satisfies the policy (at least well enough for the IT guy to bluff his way through).
This isn't really comparable to political dissent being squashed, of course, but it gave me a pretty chilling view of Microsoft and their anti-piracy practices that I hadn't been aware of, and makes me far more likely to believe that MS would participate in using the thug power of Russian police in order to scare organizations and individuals out of pirating their products.
I'll also note that the BSA "report your neighbor" whistle-blower policy, which has been in effect for a couple of decades, has always reeked a little of the secret police and surveillance culture found in oppressive regimes.
It's actually our commercial software in question (we have a dual-licensed model for Virtualmin and Cloudmin, with the Open Source variant being under the GPL). I'm going to Photoshop something up for him, with the serial number and license key.
I'm tempted to pirate the Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity, and stick our numbers in there. There would be some sort of poetic something or other in that.
The truly nefarious aspect of this weird policy (which seems to exist, in lesser forms in other places, based on demands we've had for various specific bits of information on invoices) is that Open Source software is completely out of the running in the organizations that embrace such a policy. In our case, Virtualmin is an umbrella under which a couple dozen Open Source apps run, so I guess having the certificate for Virtualmin satisfies the policy (at least well enough for the IT guy to bluff his way through).
This isn't really comparable to political dissent being squashed, of course, but it gave me a pretty chilling view of Microsoft and their anti-piracy practices that I hadn't been aware of, and makes me far more likely to believe that MS would participate in using the thug power of Russian police in order to scare organizations and individuals out of pirating their products.
I'll also note that the BSA "report your neighbor" whistle-blower policy, which has been in effect for a couple of decades, has always reeked a little of the secret police and surveillance culture found in oppressive regimes.