"they say helping your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship" http://juraj.bednar.sk/work/prace/computer/freesoft/stallman.php Even the law differentiates between different kinds of crime. Not everything is in black and white. Often, there are many shades of grey. --Neelesh

I guess you know this: Microsoft is porting it to FreeBSD. Corel has been hired by Microsoft for .NET porting. Mono (http://www.go-mono.net)is implementing it for Linux. GNU (http://www.gnu.org) has its own dotGNU initiative. Free software doesn't work off charity. --Neelesh

I guess you know this: Microsoft is porting it to FreeBSD. Corel has been hired by Microsoft for .NET porting. Mono (http://www.go-mono.net)is implementing it for Linux. GNU (http://www.gnu.org) has its own dotGNU initiative. Free software doesn't work off charity. --Neelesh

Right you are, sir! XP activation will simply punish the genuine retail user who are "helping out" their neighbours. Is this kind of piracy as bad as the one done by real pirates out on the sea? Or the professional crackers? Its a point of introspection. --Neelesh

PLEASE DON'T OBFUSCATE THE ISSUE OF PRIVACY WITH PIRACY. People with legal copies of Win XP would have legitimate concerns of privacy. You may want to read these this article by Stewart Alsop: http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc\_id=203359 Microsoft certainly deserves credit for C#, CLR and other terrific innovations. Passport and Hailstorm are good but couldn't Microsoft have thought up of alternative architectures? Why should a single entity have so much info about citizens? No one except the government should. Maybe even the government shouldn't! Microsoft has failed miserably on the PR front as far as privacy concerns go. Besides, why does XP require Raw Sockets? Do they want a TCP/MS? http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html --Neelesh