While I hate M$ about as much as the man, I'm afraid I have to actually side with them on general prinicples. While the major MS product, Window$ is little more than a poorly executed port of MacOS, they have put a tremendous effort into development, marketing, software support, and all those other things that make a fairly incompetent end user happy. They do have a right to realize a profit from the work they have placed into a product, provided it sells, and not to have the end product stolen from them.

Therefore, rather than simple pirating, we must use other methods to bring the evil empire to it's knees. Support emulation projects along the line of WINE, and ports of third party commercial software, so that windows loses it it's lock on extremely easy to use, mildy versatile software, that runs on all those Intel chips that someone bought for some reason. As this particular AC pointed out, M$ cannot survive without it's profit. Let's take that profit away from them, but let's do in the way that's not only legal, but has the additional effect of grinding the notion that not only do we not need the shoddy M$ OS, we don't want it either. Pirating sends the message that we do want it, but not on M$'s terms.

Simply put, I think we should stop spitting in Billy boy's eye, in order to punch that same eye.