Microsoft’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” is a push for encouraging users of illicitly licensed Microsoft proprietary software to pay for legally licensed copies. Microsoft sends out a program with system updates which checks over the entire Microsoft Windows system and informs the user if the program concludes that some Microsoft program is not “genuine”.

Of course, “genuine” is the wrong word to use here. Microsoft’s issue concerns whether the license is issued to the user and legitimately obtained (again, according to Microsoft’s records).

So what happens if Microsoft’s software is wrong? Apparently what happens is you either decide to continue to be treated this way by your proprietor, or you decide to switch to free software instead.

Microsoft knows their Windows Genuine Advantage software is broken. They admit that Windows Genuine Advantage problems are coming up more commonly now..

But this is all to be expected when you give up your freedom. If you had the freedom to share the software, nobody would need to check up on where you got your copy. So the question becomes will you switch to running free software?

Perhaps it’s time for you to try OpenOffice.org, Gnumeric (a spreadsheet program), Firefox and Thunderbird, or even switch to a GNU/Linux operating system? There are some easily installed and easily tried choices from Fedora GNU/Linux, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, and Ututo GNU/Linux.