> This looks like a lot of effort for pirated software, unless I'm missing something.
This is false. Whatever law may protect Microsoft from people being awesome & investing enormous effort improving their products for them- and I'm sure there are plenty such laws- this claim of piracy seems false.
I do not see any product keys on the download page. These folks have no interest in helping piracy.
Eh it’s clearly a violation not to mention the trademark violations everywhere. it wouldn’t take much to go through the image to find unlicensed msft programs and likeness. Sometimes hn confuses how things ought to be reasoning from first principals with how they actually are.
It's awesome to me that no one can clearly state what this is a violation of, but we all tend to agree, yes, a rag-tag group of product-loving enthusiasts absolutely have no right to go poke around & make things awesome & cool & to improve the product. That's absolutely not ok. We agree. But we also don't even know why or how we got here & why that is.
There’s a difference between “what ought to be” and “what is.”
I get that you think this project is cool and the authors are doing admirable work. I don’t necessarily disagree there but the reality is this is not legally defensible. It is a violation of copyright to redistribute software without the copyright owner’s permission. That is the definition of software piracy. Whether or not Microsoft pursues legal action is a separate matter.
> This looks like a lot of effort for pirated software, unless I'm missing something.
This is false. Whatever law may protect Microsoft from people being awesome & investing enormous effort improving their products for them- and I'm sure there are plenty such laws- this claim of piracy seems false.
I do not see any product keys on the download page. These folks have no interest in helping piracy.