Free Win 10 from MSFT

Windows 10 will be a free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users this summer, but Microsoft is also extending its offer to software pirates. "We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10," says Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s Windows chief, in an interview with Reuters. The move means that thousands, perhaps millions, of machines will get a free copy of Windows 10 even if a license has not been properly acquired. While the Reuters report is focused on China, it's not immediately clear if this extends to other regions, but Myerson's "all qualified PCs" appears to suggest so. The Verge has reached out to Microsoft to clarify.

Microsoft has a long history of attempts to thwart software piracy. Windows XP was the company's first operating system to introduce software activation to verify license keys, but it was quickly defeated using a corporate license key that many pirates shared on the internet back in 2001. Software activation has evolved throughout various versions of Windows, but pirates have largely managed to bypass it each time. While Microsoft's plan might seem like letting software pirates go free, studies have found that in a lot of cases pirated Windows licenses are installed on new machines without customers even knowing they have an illegal copy. Microsoft has tried various methods to encourage those customers to return their machines or seek out a legal copy, but it’s headache and a bad experience of Windows itself if that’s the first thing you have to deal with in certain regions.