Very perceptive blog post.  Excerpt:

Just the other day I conducted a survey among my friends about the genuine status of their Operating System. And the result of the survey was:

• Genuine Windows 9%
• Pirated Windows 89%
• Linux/Mac 1%

This did not come a surprise to me as I live in India, here pirated software rules thanks to high prices of software as compared to the salaries of individuals. Here pirated software like Adobe Photoshop, MS Office, and Windows XP or Vista which actually cost over $150.00 are available for about $1.50. People as such prefer purchasing the latter and saving large sum which they have had to shell out otherwise. CDs of such software are sold like fishes in a fish market.

This does not bother me. For me piracy is a phenomenon by which the corporates are unable to earn extra pocket-money by the end of the month. But what surprises me is Microsoft’s attitude towards the piracy of its software.

Microsoft in the recent years have been attacked for their tactics for genuine software. People think they are over-committing against piracy. But I feel they are genuinely mistaken. In fact they are under-committing. Microsoft clearly are secretly encouraging piracy…

Spot on, IMHO. The case for Open Source software is much easier to make when people understand the true cost of proprietary software.  Piracy enables them to kid themselves about the real costs of using proprietary stuff.