[Sussex] "I'd rather break the law than use open source..."

[Geoff Teale]

It's a not uncommon attitude - almost all home users I know either paid
for Office with their computer or they have an illegal copy.

Microsoft's message works really well with people who have little  or no
knowledge of IT systems, no matter how savy we think we are, most of us
are affected much more by advertising than we realise.  

In businesses you face the same dismissal of non-MS software - but they
generally understand that they need to buy a license.  Home users on the
other hand are very sure that nobody is going to knock on their door and
do a license audit.  For that reason people will merrily continue to use
illegal copies to use the software which they are convinced is that only
choice.

One thing you should point out is that if you friends dad takes an
illegitimate copy of Office from disks purchased for the companies use
then he has just invalidated the licenses for all of the Microsoft
software used within the company.

For anything other than a small company the cost of this breach could
certainly be very large.  For this reasons alone I have worked for at
least two companies who have included the handling on non-original media
in their list of activities that construe gross misconduct. 

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation