China Protects Microsoft

Posted on August 1, 2007
Filed Under Interesting Stuff |

But not for reasons you might expect. This post in StrategyPage is so fascinating that I decided to clip the whole piece:

July 24, 2007: Facing U.S. import restrictions, China finally allowed major software counterfeiters to be shut down. Nearly ten million dollars in CD manufacturing equipment was seized, along with nearly 300,000 CDs, many packaged to appear identical to the real thing (various Microsoft, and other major publishers, products). Ironically, this rampant piracy has prevented the Chinese government from getting most civilian Chinese PC users to switch to Linux. With the pirated Windows software available, the Linux price advantage largely disappeared. There was more application software available for Windows, thus it was much more popular than Linux. However, this makes the Chinese economy much more vulnerable to attack via the Internet. This is just what the American military, and many civilian agencies, are calling for. The U.S. wants to establish a policy for retaliating, on a massive scale, for increasing Chinese Internet based espionage operations. China would like to force Chinese to pay full price for Microsoft products, thus forcing more people to use Linux. But because of the shortage of business and game software for Linux, most people still prefer Windows, and will continue to support counterfeiters. Looks like hard times ahead for the software pirates.

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