No, not the Somali pirating that’s lately gained some notoriety. Software pirating-ish, sorta, kinda not quite.
When Me$$y$oft gave away demo/”preview” copies of Windows 7 alpha at WINHEC the other day, “Some one made the sketch his own” as it were, and almost immediately iso files (in torrents) were sprouting up all over the web.
OK, so I’m downloading one of ’em now. Of course, as I understand it, the thing has a 30-day kill switch and is designed to be a trial, so while I may be violating some law’s letter (I haven’t actually checked the nitty gritty on the licensing), I may actually be observing the spirit of the law better than those who stick to its letter. *huh*? The spirit of copyright law is, “Do no monetary harm to the copyright holder and do not harm the copyright holder by making unauthorized changes to his work.”Heck, I may (may) actually do Me$$y$oft some good if its claims for Windows 7 pan out by giving it a positive review.
Caveats: if the torrent fails, I’ll bail on checking out/reviewing Win7. AND, even if the torrent succeeds, this is a very, very early release and may be too buggy for even a fair VM tryout. VM? Yep. You don’t expect I’d hazard a REAL machine with an alpha-release OS, do you? *heh* Anywho, here’re a couple of graphics to whet your appetite:
BTW, while I don’t usually try out pre-release OSes, because I just don’t like “sacrificing” a working machine for the task, VMs are giving me a LOT of flexibility there. Using up a lot of hard drive space, too, but that’s what large hard drives were made for, eh? (Still, I may have to buy a couple of nice big drives somewhere soon down the road, but with 500GiB drives for $50 that probably won’t be that big a deal. Need spares, anyway.)
Also note another Very Good Reason to try this iso out in a VM:
No-one yet knows if any malware has been injected into the ISO, so anyone downloading it will surely be hoping that is not the case.
Consider yourself warned.