Snitch And You Shall Be Rewarded

In her continued bid to become (yet another) world-class hub, this time for R&D, Singapore has introduced yet another scheme (re: link below) to catch those miscreant flouters of the law. Now I don't know about other companies, but my dad bought the OFFICIAL version of Windows Office Professional for a rather hefty price, somewhere in the region of S$400 not too long ago. I thought it'd be a good time for me to stop my miserly ways and use the legal version too, and (upon the exhortations of my dad) decided to install it into my machine. Alas, and hour later, when I tried to (well, I had to) register the software, I was none-too subtly informed that This Software Had Been Installed On A Computer Once Preceeding This Attempt, which effectively rendered my copy a very white elephant 40 uses henceforth. How generous of the people at Microsoft.

So for the next month or so, I gingerly side-stepped any encounters with Windows Excel, Powerpoint and most especially my best friend till the day of the incident, Word for Windows, unless in cases of utmost urgency and of sheer necessity (like doing up my timetable for this semester). Wordpad was my new best friend. And for a while, everything I sent people was in RTF format, but since no one complained or asked why I suppose this doesn't affect the lives of the Microsoft-enriched very much. Oh, the wretchedness of being dependent on the IT juggernaunts of this world. Any juggernaunt, for that matter. Thankfully I have long extricated myself from the fat, trans fatty arms of McD's, and was never once part of those enthralled by the caffeinated wafts of Starbucks. Bush Jr I still can't quite shake off.

But I digress. So this morning, during my newly-embarked attempt at keeping up-to-date with the daily happenings of the world deemed important enough by the powers that be to be reported to the island at large, I came across this ad. Commissioned by the Business Software Alliance (never heard of it before), it calls for employees of companies to Take the Moral Stand, and report any of those opportunistic Capitalists (who also happen to be overworking and under-paying them) aiming to increase profit for under-licensing. Luckily for Microsoft, they've already got their asses covered and thus need no extra protection from the lads at BSA.

But perhaps there is nothing really to get worked up about. Lip service needs to be paid at times for the big daddies to get off our backs. I'm referring to the recently-concluded USSFTA. Along with clamping down on online piracy (don't look at me, you'll find nothing here. No, honestly.), this may be another step they need to take in order to fulfil the clauses of the Agreement. In view of the culture here, it is not likely that the hotline is going to get a significant number of calls, and perhaps this is why such a scheme was introduced in the first place. Besides, the government has never really liked to get its hands involved in such matters (as far as I can see) unless it was imperative for them to do so, being the pragmatic organisation that it has always been. So has The Man won? Maybe, but maybe we should count whatever small blessings there are that come our way.

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