Piracy has had companies by the balls for years now. Its pirates that have backed them into a corner and forced them to bite.
Forced them to bite? Wow. That's certainly an interesting fantasy you have there.For starters, if it hadn't been for piracy, Microsoft would have been bankrupt YEARS ago. You think they would have gotten a foothold over IBM if everyone had been forced to BUY Windows? Of course not - don't be silly.
Secondly, companies have been dreaming up increasingly elaborate (and draconian) copy protection schemes since the invention of the printing press, and not a single one of them has put so much as a dent in piracy - all it does is inconvenience legitimate consumers.
You need evidence that piracy is a massive problem?
Well not if you're religious about it. But basically the scientific method involves, providing among other things, corroborative evidence to support a given hypothesis. Unfortunately every scientific peer-reviewed publication on the subject (which granted, don't amount to much) point in the other direction. In addition to user-friendly-ness, the developer-friendly-ness of an OS makes a huge difference in it's desirability.
No it doesn't. The PS2 being a perfect example of an absolutely horrible platform with almost embarrassing amounts of software for it. QED. Sure if you're doing it for shits and giggles, it's a factor, but everyone who works for a living will tell you that Marketing people, not developers are the ones who get to chose platforms. Not many people will argue (except those who haven't tried it) the fact that Microsoft's (free) Visual Studio is simply the best application development tool suite available.
I will, but you probably figured as much. Microsofts (free) Visual Studio is absolutely horrible. In order to make it even marginally as useful as many other IDEs you need to install at least half a dozen plug-ins (which you can't legally do with the free version). Sure it's great for writing those little tools like grep and tail (the kind of programs proper operating systems come with), but for any real application it's a complete joke, and the free one more so (it even refuses to compile Windows Services, so you need to have at least 2 IDEs installed, Visual Studio Expres and SharpDevelop - brilliant).It's refactoring "suite" is a joke (get ReSharper instead). It took until version 2008 for Microsoft to rip off NUnit. Its "intellisense" feature is laughably poor compared to other IDEs auto-completeion features (again get ReSharper). It doesn't do proper (any?) code analysis (again, ReSharper) . It doesn't provide CASE tools (anyone got a good suggestion here?). It forces you to write convenience functions yourself (get JustCode). It's error "detection" will occasionally report errors that aren't errors, and fail to catch ones that are. For any non-trivial GUI, using the designer is a surefire way to ruin your day. The whole IDE is designed specifically for single user environments and doesn't integrate well (or not at all) with collaboration software like like version control software and issue tracking software.
In order for Linux to even begin to compete with Windows or OSX, it's really going to have to work out a lot of issues (like the lack of a universal EXE) first.
So now you're saying that Virtual Machines are better than code compiled directly for the target hardware? By the way there has been a universal "exe" format (ELF) for the last 10 years.