@Ed,

Noticeably (and I dare say conveniently) missing from your posit is the more basic and fundamental question of rightness vs wrongness. Use of a keygen is wrong. Period. It matters not if it can be gotten away with. Wrong is wrong, and no amount of wishing on what at least APPEARS to be your part will change that.

Integrity means doing the right thing even when no one’s watching. Parsing the issues you’ve parsed in that to which I’m here responding — especially given the biting irony of that trustworthiness plays any role in it — is laughable in its so pathetically missing the larger and more important point that keygens are just plain wrong; and so all other points regarding them (at least of the sort that you’re making) are moot.

If you want it essentially free, then do it the honorable way and go with open-source (or, of course, freeware). If you want what costs money, then PAY the money. Negotiate for the lowest price, of course; or even talk the selling into donating or bartering it… all of those things are honorable.

Using a keygen is not. And so, then, all that is both explicit and implicit in your “it’s just more propaganda to make people scared to use a keygen” is, in both either case, and in fact, ultimately shameful.

Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com

MY RESPONSE: Au contraire, mon ami! The compiled code of the keygen executable (.exe file) is quite often intentionally malware infected; and quite often, even when it’s not, it was written using the same IDE/compiler/linker that malware authors use, and so code written/compiled and linked with it will bear the very same signature as does malware, and so anti-malware will flag it as infected, even if it’s not.

But there’s a far bigger problem with keygens… a problem for legitimate owners of Microsoft products, to wit: If some keygen out there in the universe just happens to generate the very same key that is on a label on the outside of the CD case of a legitimate Microsoft product; and if said Keygen-generated code happens to get registred with Microsoft before the legitimate product is sold, then the person who bought the legitimate product ends-up trying to register its key with Microsoft after that same key has already been registered by a fraudster…

…and it ends-up being the legitimate product owner who has to fast-talk Microsoft into basically issuing him/her a new key (which we ALSO hope hasnn’t already inadvertently been keygen-generated by someone out there) in order to make the product for which s/he paid finally actually work. If Microsoft happens not to believe him/her (which, ultimately, may be remedied by his/her forwarding to Microsoft a scan of his/her CD case with the key on it, as well as a copy of his/her receipt from legitimately purchasing it), then s/he must go through a lot of time-consuming and irritating steps to finally get Microsoft to relent.

Makers and users of keygens shouldn’t have the power to DO that to people! That, alone, should be a crime.

Or so it is MY two cents worth, in any case…

…which, it’s worthy of note, my ex-wife always used to say was pretty much ALL it was ever worth. [grin]

Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com