> This equilibrium state is exactly the point aimed for by the corporations that create these open secrets.
Not necessarily. You know that biological evolution is blind, but thriving in a market environment doesn't require companies to know why what they are doing is successful.
So eg Photoshop (and Windows) used to be really easy to 'pirate' by individuals. And you can argue that this was good for Adobe (and Microsoft), because it's like an informal education discount: youngsters get used to the software at home and train themselves, so that later on it becomes the obvious choice for the office.
But for the mechanism to work, Adobe doesn't have to understand the mechanism. They could just not know at all about the pirating, or conclude that it's too much hassle to chase the pirates (but be completely unaware of the positive effects). Or on the contrary, they could over-estimate the positive effects of piracy etc.
Microsoft products are trivial to pirate thanks to Microsoft Activation Scripts [1] which is on GitHub. It is inconceivable that they aren't aware of it with 102k stars. That can only be deliberate.
I agree: I am sure that people at Microsoft are aware these days.
The first commit in the Microsoft Activation Scripts repository is from 2020. For Microsoft the dynamic I describe goes back all the way to the 1980s (and perhaps even earlier.)
Back in the 1970s and 1980s people at Microsoft might or might not have been aware. (I don't know for sure either way.) But it already worked in their favour.
My point is that the dynamic works whether or not anyone is aware of it.
Having a cloud account is entirely disconnected from the activation state of Windows, and always will be. The activation state of Windows is a property of a Windows installation, because Windows installations — all the ones Microsoft cares about, at least — are managed (including license management!) by the IT departments of organizations; while Windows logins are managed by individual users.
Microsoft would be breaking their own business model in half if they forced each user to have a "Windows subscription" bound to their personal cloud account, instead of being able to just sign a $10MM/yr contract with Oracle or EY or whomever for a 100K-seat volume license.
Remember also that many large-scale deployments of Windows machines aren't of personal computers at all, but of:
1. workstations with non-cloud Active Directory-managed user accounts, with the accounts and data on the machine being backed up to corporate servers and thus the machine itself able to be drop-in replaced overnight without the user even noticing the change;
2. workstations with roaming user profiles configured, where many different people log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (think: computer labs, internet cafes, etc)
3. shared workstations where many employees log in and out of the same computer throughout the day (may overlap with 1) — think of the computers behind the desks at the customer-service wickets at a bank
4. machines with no logged-in users, only an AD administrator remote-managing them through domain privileges — think e.g. digital signage
If licensing status attaches to the logged-in user, then none of these use-cases work! And together, these use-cases form 80+% of how Microsoft makes money from Windows!
> This equilibrium state is exactly the point aimed for by the corporations that create these open secrets.
Not necessarily. You know that biological evolution is blind, but thriving in a market environment doesn't require companies to know why what they are doing is successful.
So eg Photoshop (and Windows) used to be really easy to 'pirate' by individuals. And you can argue that this was good for Adobe (and Microsoft), because it's like an informal education discount: youngsters get used to the software at home and train themselves, so that later on it becomes the obvious choice for the office.
But for the mechanism to work, Adobe doesn't have to understand the mechanism. They could just not know at all about the pirating, or conclude that it's too much hassle to chase the pirates (but be completely unaware of the positive effects). Or on the contrary, they could over-estimate the positive effects of piracy etc.