What’s tended to happen with other manufacturers is that end-of-line products receive something along the lines of an authorised keygen. Or, since reverse-engineering is permitted (even by the DMCA) for purposes of interoperability, breaking the authorisation mechanism goes unchallenged.

Naturally, they’re still bastards for implementing it in the first place. I’m going to be looking at other operating systems when 2000 no longer does what I want — and that’s due to Microsoft’s decision to inconvenience legitimate customers whilst the genuinely malicious walk straight through their security.

A similar situation is occurring now with various games — the copied version is much more straightforward for users to get working than the copy they bought.

Sheer fucking stupidity…