Forget pirating Windows

There was a post on HN a few days ago from someone giving reasons for wanting to move to pirating Windows after many years of licensing the OS. I didn't really agree with the thinking behind these ideas. If you are doing anything non-trivial with a computer the cost of licensing the OS every few years is just about insignificant. Provided, of course, that the upgrade results in value that can be measured and exceeds the cost in both time and dollars of upgrading.

And here is where the problems lie.

Back in the days, the OS and applications could, for the most part, live in their own sandbox. One could upgrade a machine, and even the OS and continue working in short order. Then came the "registry", the DLL and all manner of ideas designed to, yes, simplify, but also to control and constrain.

Today, migrating a machine to new hardware and even upgrading the OS can be a long and painful process. Segregating the OS from your applications is virtually impossible. A catastrophic OS failure (or system drive failure) can result in having to re-install all applications in a machine.

We have applications that require hours of installation and configuration time. Complex tool-sets like Xilinx and Altera development systems and compilers, EDA and Finite Element Analysis tools, suites from the likes of Adobe, etc. Even tools such as MS Office require hours of installation, configuration and activation work.

The reality is that, even if the OS upgrade was offered for free --or pirated for free--, it could cost a business user thousands of dollars per machine to navigate the upgrade process.

This is completely and utterly unnecessary and not one iota of progress has been seen out of MS in this area in, yes, decades.

This issue has also resulted in the virtual stagnation of hardware upgrades for some. To use our own examples, we have machines running applications that can certainly benefit from more cores, memory and speed. Without the aforementioned issues, business would easily justify annual hardware upgrades.

However companies refrain from these upgrades. Why? Well, the reasons are many, but one of them certainly is the nightmare that the upgrade process can turn into.

Who wants to face the possibility of invalidating the installations of dozens and dozens of packages and applications? Who wants to risk having to spend weeks re-building a system? Who wants to have this happen across dozens, or hundreds of machines?

The answer is simple: Nobody.

And so, machines remain as they were. No upgrades. No productivity gains. No progress. This, in very real terms, costs end-users, MS and hardware vendors billions per year. Nobody wins.

How should this work? Well, I should be able to keep the OS and applications completely segregated from each other. If they live on separate physical drives, I should be able to rip the system drive out, install a blank drive, install the OS and be back up and running --with all apps intact and working-- in no time at all. I should be able to transfer the system and application drives into a new hardware platform and be back up and working as quickly as the machine comes up. Or, better yet, I should be able to buy a brand new machine with the latest OS pre-installed, move my application drive into it and be up and running with all of my tools and software by the time it boots for the first time. I should be able to install my applications --licensed applications-- onto an external drive and move that drive back and forth between home and work computers while retaining full use of all my apps. I should be able to give workers drives with all of the applications they are going to need for a task pre-installed and ready to run. All they should be have to do is plug them in and go.

Forget pirating Windows! Who the hell wants that nightmare?

So, yeah, MS, good luck with Windows 8. No thanks. Not even if it were free.